Book gets close to the music that made stars of Carpenters
LOS ANGELES — “Every sha-la-la-la, every wo-o-wo-o still shines,” the Carpenters’ sang in “Yesterday Once More,” their hit 1973 tribute to the songs of the past.
It could be the tagline of a new book on the work of Richard and Karen Carpenter, which seeks to set aside the noise surrounding the duo and focus on their harmonic creations.
“Carpenters: The Musical Legacy” (Princeton Architectural Press, 344 pages, $35), coming 50 years after the duo’s earliest hits, was co-written by Richard Carpenter, along with Associated Press journalists Mike Cidoni Lennox and Chris May.
Carpenter has passed on many retrospective projects, after facing decades of questions about his sister’s inner life and her death in 1983 from heart failure, a complication of anorexia, at age 32. This was a chance to do something different.
“It was the focus on the music itself, that’s primarily it,” Carpenter said as he sat at his piano in his Southern California home.
It has the heft and visual history of a coffee table book, but it’s also a nearly note-for-note musical biography of the duo that goes back to their childhood lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where Richard Carpenter found the seeds of the group’s sound in his father’s records and a toy jukebox.
The book makes clear that their elaborate, multilayered recordings were made while the young duo maintained a staggering schedule of touring and television appearances.
It gives an accounting of nearly every rainy day and Monday they spent in a hectic 1970, the year “(They Long to Be) Close to You” became their breakthrough hit. Somehow amid it all they recorded their third album, 1971’s “Carpenters,” known to fans as the tan album and regarded by many as their best.
The Carpenters were often derided as makers of schmaltzy throwaway hits. But the book argues they were great creators of fully formed albums, with an incredible run of records between 1970’s “Close to You” and 1973’s “Now & Then,” the concept album that solidified their global stardom.
“We had so many hit singles, and usually right in a row, that we tended to be dismissed again by our detractors as a singles band,” Carpenter said. “We sold millions of albums.”
Carpenter’s ear for finding hits, often in unlikely places, was as essential as his ear for making them.
He found “Superstar,” the Carpenters song probably most beloved of younger generations, when he heard Bette Midler sing it on “The Tonight Show.” He came across “We’ve Only Just Begun” in a bank commercial before they made it a hit.
And he knew a song was useless if it didn’t match his sister’s stunning alto voice. “I could give you a list of songs that I heard on the radio that I went right out and bought and yet knew would not work for Karen and me,” he said. “That we were brother and sister just had a whole lot to do with it.”
He also reconsidered his musical catalog on the forthcoming “Richard Carpenter’s Piano Songbook.” He reimagines several of the band’s biggest hits for solo piano on the album slated for a January release.