LOS ANGELES, Nov. 8 (U.S.): “Everything la-la-la, still all woo-woo-o lights up,” Carpenters sang on “Yesterday Again,” a 1973 hit for songs of the past.
It could be the tagline for a new book on the work of Richard and Karen Carpenter, which seeks to put aside the noise surrounding the duo and focus on their harmonic creations.
Richard Carpenter co-wrote Carpenters: The Musical Legacy (Princeton University Press), which came 50 years after the duo’s first hits, with Mike Sidonie Lennox and Chris May at The Associated Press.
Carpenter has gone through several retrospective projects, having faced decades of questions about his sister’s inner life and her death in 1983 from heart failure, a complication of anorexia, at the age of 32. This was an opportunity to do something different, The Associated Press (AP) reports.
“The focus was on the music itself, and that’s it first,” Carpenter told the Associated Press while sitting at the piano in his Southern California home. “It touches on things that we haven’t touched on before or that, if that happens, have been overlooked.”
The book has the weight and visual history of a coffee table book, but it’s also an almost musical autobiography of the couple going back to their childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, where Richard Carpenter found the seeds for the group. Voice in his father’s recordings and a music box game.
He cites some unexpected influences, including another man-woman duo, Les Paul and Mary Ford, who gave his early experiments with overtones and layered harmony.
“It made a deep impression on me, that’s ooh-ah, ooh-ah. I was probably 5 or 6 years old,” Carpenter said. “I had no idea how to do all this. I knew it was different and that I really liked it. And after so many years, of course, it came to my mind as I was arranging a lot of things I wrote Harmony for.”
A lesser known name is attributed to choral arranger Judd Conlon who appeared in the Disney films “Peter Pan” and “Alice in Wonderland”.
“His arranging style for multiple songs was tight,” Carpenter said. “They were very close harmonies, and they made a huge impact on me.”
The book explains that their complex and layered recordings were made while the young duo maintained an impressive schedule of tours and television appearances.
Giving an account of nearly every rainy day and Monday spent in hectic 1970’s, the year “(They Long) Close to You” was a hit. Somehow amid it all, they recorded their second album, 1971’s “The Carpenters,” known to fans as the Tan Album and considered by many to be their best.
Carpenters often mocked schmaltzy token stroke makers. But the writers argue that they were great creators of full-fledged albums, with an incredible number of records between the 1970s “Close to You” and 1973’s “Now & Then”, the concept album that cemented their international stardom.
“We’ve had so many hit singles, usually straight straight, that we tend to get rejected again by our critics as a solo band,” Carpenter said. “We sold millions of albums.”
Carpenter’s ear for finding strikes, often in unlikely places, was as essential as his ear for making them.
He found “Superstar,” the Carpenters’ song perhaps the most beloved of younger generations, when he heard Bette Midler sing it on “The Tonight Show.” He came across the phrase “we’re just getting started” in a bank commercial before they had a hit.
When he heard them, he only knew what to do with them.
“If the song hits me, whether it’s my song or you say a song I heard, like ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ or ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’ or ‘Superstar,’ if the song has it, Carpenter said, ‘I just got sorted on the spot,” Carpenter said. .
And he knew the song would be useless if it didn’t match Alto’s amazing voice to his sister.
He said, “I could give you a list of songs I heard on the radio that I immediately went out and bought, yet I knew they wouldn’t work with Karen and me.” “That we were brother and sister had a lot to do with this.”
He also revisited his music catalog for the upcoming “Richard Carpenter’s Piano Songbook”. He reimagined many of the band’s biggest hits for piano solo on the album due for release in January.
Amid all this looking back, Carpenter recently made his first visit in nearly 30 years to what were formerly A&M Records studios in Hollywood. Now it belongs to the company of Jim Henson and the Muppets, who did not change it much.
It was an emotional journey.
“We spent so much of our lives there that it was like coming home,” he said.
RAE