- Awards
- 44
Karen and Richard's songs have been something of a constant thread in my life's soundtrack since I first discovered music. Along with ABBA and Barry Manilow, Carpenters are one of a handful of "heritage" acts handed down to me through my parents' musical tastes in the Seventies and Eighties. They liked many other artists but, for whatever reason, it's the more safe MOR acts - "white bread" as Karen occasionally described their image - that stuck with me.
It goes without saying (almost) that Karen's voice is a huge part of the Carps' appeal. It almost makes one shudder to wonder what would have happened had Karen - her first love being drumming - not ended up taking lead almost by accident.
Richard's arrangements, too, have contributed hugely to the music's immortality. All those rich layers of harmonies and instrumentation creating a heavenly, immersive kind of ear candy that's best appreciated with a pair of good headphones. It's a manufactured - almost formulaic - kind of sound, but in the best way possible. He knows exactly where Karen's voice needs to be and tailors the music to that, creating a sound that's entirely their own.
But it's Richard and Karen as people that gives the music its heart and emotion. There's a lot of contradictory stuff going on. Karen's rich and mature voice creates the impression of someone worldly and serious, but watching her in interviews, seeing photos or hearing outtakes, it's clear that she's witty and with a sense of fun. There are so many photos of her pulling faces, and she does the same in interviews. I love that outtake at the end of Let Me Be The One where Karen can be heard just goofing around.
But there's also the flip side of that. Two talented young siblings who embrace their wholesome, clean cut, all-American "white bread" image to the extent that it precludes any acknowledgement or discussion of painful ghosts. In turn creating a perfect storm where the only outlet - the only place to take it - is the music itself.
This in turn creates art, because each piece of music becomes an avatar for Richard and Karen themselves: accessible, endearing and beautiful; the result of much hard work and a striving for perfection; cheerful and joyous. All with an unspoken-yet-tangible pain that touches something raw and dark within artists and listener both.
This atmosphere can be found in many covers or tracks written by other writers, from Ticket To Ride to I Can Dream, Can't I? (a truly underrated Carpenters song) to Superstar to Where Do I Go From Here? But it occurs to me that many of the songs which seem to really expose that pain are those co-written by Richard. Just as the angst can be heard in Karen's voice, so is it present in the lyrics. With the benefit of hindsight, is there a more poignant and truthful line than Only Yesterday's "In my own time nobody knew the pain I was going through"?
While Goodbye To Love might be the most obvious choice for Richard and Karen's masterpiece of writing/vocal collaboration, it struck me just this week that I Need To Be In Love might be THE Carpenters song. It's the one in which both seem most exposed, open and even self-aware. It's almost a stream of consciousness about a belief system or ethos that doesn't work. The lyric "I know I ask perfection of a quite imperfect world; and fool enough to think that's what I'll find" is so wonderfully contradictory. The very idea of seeking perfection while knowing it's futile manages to be simultaneously hopeful and hopeless. There's a cry for help from someone who is isolated and terribly alone ("wide awake at 4am without a friend in sight"), but one that's immediately followed by a WASP-ish form of denial from arm's length that keeps others from truly reaching them: "I'm hangin' on a hope, but I'm all right".
The truth of this can only be told in the reading given by Karen, and there's one performance in particular of this track that's painful to watch because of how much investment Karen seems to have in the lyrics.
For whatever reason, I Need To Be In Love isn't a song that I'd considered top-tier Carps until revisiting it this week and having a proper listen with headphones. Which goes to show that there's always new gold to be mined from their material, no matter how familiar it may appear to be.
