Book gets close to the music that made Carpenters superstars
LOS ANGELES – “Every sha-la-la-la, every woo-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), coming 50 years after the duo’s earliest hits, was co-written by Richard Carpenter, along with Associated Press journalist 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 told the AP as he sat at his piano in his Southern California home. “It touches on things that we hadn’t touched on before or that if we had, it had been ignored.”
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 pair 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.
He cites some unexpected influences, including another man-and-woman duo, Les Paul and Mary Ford, whose early experimenting with vocal overdubs and layered harmonies electrified him.
“It made a profound impression on me, that oohah, ooh-ah. I was maybe 5 or 6,” Carpenter said. “I had no idea how all this was done. I just knew it was different and that I really liked it. And many years later, of course, it came up in my mind while I was arranging a lot of things that I wrote the harmonies for.”
He credits a less famous name with a well-known sound, choral arranger Judd Conlon, whose work appeared in Disney’s “Peter Pan” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
“His arranging style for multi-vocals was tight,” Carpenter said. “They were very close harmonies, which had a great big effect on me.”
The book makes clear that their elaborate, multi-layered 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.