She could also brighten our day by singing about “The Top of the World” or reminiscing about the songs she and her brother grew up with, in “Yesterday Once More.”Īs you can hear from the live performance videos, Karen didn’t need computer tricks or AutoTune. Karen often sang in a low, deep range, so when she sang about “Rainy Days and Mondays” always getting her down, she sold every word of it. Even though she was barely out of her teens, her voice had a very mature, womanly “lived in” quality. These were followed by a long string of hits in the 1970s. It soon went all the way to number one, followed by “We’ve Only Just Begun,” which was originally a bank commercial. They took an old Burt Bacharach song called “Close to You” that had been recorded by several artists and made it their own. The following year, they found the right formula. Their first release was a re-working of the Beatles hit “Ticket to Ride.” It was performed as a ballad by Karen and her brother Richard, a gifted pianist and producer. I was not yet a teenager when the Carpenters’ run of soft-rock hits began. On my top-40 radio station, I hadn’t played a Carpenters record in years, with the exception of “Merry Christmas Darling” which was in the stack of holiday records that every station played. I was numb.īy 1983, the Carpenters’ time had pretty much passed. The popular vocal half of the Carpenter siblings was only 32 years old. We had an Associated Press teletype service with only the minimum facts. We had no internet, so there were no sources of instant information, analysis, or gossip. Forty years ago this week, I was doing my radio show when I heard that Karen Carpenter had died.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |