Fanatical Friday – Guilty Pleasures – The Carpenters

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There used to be a silly kind of shame attached to admitting to liking this genre of music. It was a long time before I admitted to myself that I liked their music.

There were albums in the collection at my mum’s house that I can’t recall knowing how or why they got there. Some were very obviously my mum’s but I never saw her buying any music while I was growing up. For the first 11 years of my life, Mum rarely left the house. She suffered from agoraphobia, exacerbated by other underlying mental and physical health problems. If I was taken out for a trip out it would invariably be with the school or with neighbours and their children. Visits to the centre of Sydney were limited to perhaps twice or three times a year at the most.

Most of the music that my mum had at home was collected before I was born and it probably wasn’t until my early teens did Mum start buying music again, spurred on by my enthusiasm to start accumulating my own music collection.

There was a Carpenters album at home. It might have been Mum’s. It might have been the last thing she bought until I reached my early teens. 

The first song I was really aware of by The Carpenters was “(They Long To Be) Close To You”. Whenever it played, Mum would embarrass me by telling me that she’d sing it to me when I was a baby. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I came to appreciate what a beautiful thing that was and just thinking about it now is making my eyes well with tears. I appreciate what a bittersweet arrival I was for her. A 32 year-old woman, ditched by a married man many years her junior who I’m sure she should have known better not to get involved with, but…

The fact that she saw me as a blessing in spite of all that. In spite of already having three of her four other children to look after – and then a new baby – on her own. That line alone, “On the day that you were born, the angels got together and decided to create a dream come true.” I don’t know how she ever could think of that of me. I was such a devil of a child. I could have been much worse, I guess. But there are times where I look back on my behaviour towards her and wish I had been a better behaved child. I used to test her patience a lot. Awful to admit that when I was young I would get a kick out of goading her, doing things that I knew would piss her off and test her until I got a whipping. She was patient. It would take some doing and she would make sure I was sorry if I pushed her too far. 

I digress. 

As I say, it wasn’t until I was in my early 20s did I come to appreciate the sound of The Carpenters. I fell in love with Karen’s voice. The word “mellifluous” is absolutely the most apt word when it comes to Karen Carpenter’s voice. I don’t think she truly realised how incredible her voice was. Her tone is so glorious. Rich and pure with no hint of a false and forced vibrato – it’s all natural and effortless. Well, seemingly effortless. It was listening to her voice and the way Richard incorporated the harmonies that also made me fall in love with their sound. 

Learning that Karen also played drums ramped up the love. I have loved the drums for as long as I can remember and wanted to learn to play the drums for years. Karen ended up also being one of my drumming heroes. 

The tragedy of it is that Karen felt immense “imposter syndrome” which affected her by way of her anorexia taking hold. I was only 13 in 1983 and yet to be in that appreciation stage for their music but I understood how sad and tragic the loss of Karen was. Society’s pressures on women to be all things to all people can have detrimental effects on us. Karen felt those kinds of pressures immensely. What she put in her body was her only sense and feeling of control she had. 

I didn’t want this post to become a piece about Karen like this but it was the most tragic loss that she left us when she did. Such beautiful music remains. 

Over the years I played that album many, many times and I would borrow other music of theirs from the library. It has been mostly compilations I have listened to and I haven’t listened to anything much in recent years but thinking about which artist or group I wanted to highlight for this week’s Fanatical Friday and thinking about the kind of music I’d play before I moved to the UK, The Carpenters name came to my memory…so, here we are. 

My favourites include: 

Yesterday Once More
For All We Know
Those Good Old Dreams
Hurting Each Other
Sing

Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft is absolutely epic! What an awesome song! I don’t think I’ve ever heard the Klaatu original. For me it would be Carpenters all the way anyway. I’m not even interested in hearing the Klaatu version to be honest. 

Obviously Close To You has that special significance to me. 

Finally, there are songs that took many more years for me to appreciate and it is Superstar and Solitaire that took a shameful amount of years for me to appreciate. Superstar is one of my all time favourites as a result.

There are visuals I have with the memory of listening to them in my early 20s. A lot of time spent in my room, listening to Karen and feeling every hint of joy, pain and sorrow in her voice. It’s the words to the songs voiced through her that move me so much. Hurting Each Other – just the unravelling of the story, “No one in the world ever had a love as sweet as my love, for nowhere in the world could there be a boy as true as you, love” – oh, how I would dream of a love so sweet…even if it ended with the question of “Tell me why, then? Why should it be that we go on hurting each other?” The BIG line that would do it for me is “Closer than the leaves on a weeping willow, baby, we are” – you hear every word Karen sings. I’m gonna end up greetin’ my eyes out writing this post out, honestly! I don’t know the songwriters – they’re not names I am familiar with but the lyrics to this song are beautiful and willows are my favourite trees and, yeah! 

Their music can be melancholic but uplifting too. Sing has a beautiful sentiment that expresses so wonderfully what music does for people. Also it is why I love Yesterday Once More because it is about music itself and growing up listening to music on the radio but there’s a melancholy within it too, “those were such happy times and not so long ago, how I wondered where they’d gone.”

“All my best memories come back clearly to me, some can even make me cry / just like before, it’s yesterday once more.”

I know they didn’t write many of them but they gave the best evocations of them. Thank you, Karen, for your beautiful soul and beautiful voice.