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A&M Records Inc. 1987
The album is a departure for Carpenter, who in the past always sang backup to Karen's lead vocalon such hits as Close To You and Yesterday Once More. That pattern continued in two Carpenters LPs released since Karen's death: Voice Of The Heart, which used vocals that Karen had recorded from 1980 to '82; and a Christmas album with material left over from their 1978 Christmas album. On the new LP, Richard sings lead on six of the 10 songs. Lead vocals on the others come from Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield and a 16-year-old newcomer named Scott Grimes, who remembers the Carpenters hit We've Only Just Begun as "the very first song I sang publicly, at a wedding when I was 7."
"My intention was to get back into my music and create something new," says Carpenter. "I loved working with our older music, the Carpenters things, remixing them for CDs and all that. But I'm very much into the future too."
Still, the past was hard to forget, especially when Carpenter started to record alone for the first time. "It struck home anew that Karen was no longer with us, and I found that very upsetting," he says. "Here I was, working alone when we had always been a team, working with the same engineer, the same musicians and in the same studios, and no Karen." In Love Alone, recorded on the new album, was written in 1982 especially for Karen by Richard and lyricist John Bettis, but she didn't live to hear it. "We'd invited Karen to a Christmas party we were having here so we could play it for her," says Richard. "But it was pouring pitchforks, and she didn't want to drive all the way from her apartment. I never really saw her by a piano after that where I could play it for her. She died the following February."
Says Warwick of singing In Love Alone: "It was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done; listening to it is still difficult. But I'm thrilled Richard has gotten himself together and is making pretty music again."
Karen Carpenter's death in 1983 left her brother Richard's recording career in limbo. He produced and arranged the Carpenters' long string of hits, and had written several of them. Still, it was Karen's warm, expressive vocals that made those hits so distinctive. On this, Carpenter's first album without her, he had to make a choice: find another lead vocalist, recruit guest vocalists, or sing all the songs himself.
It would have been impossible for Carpenter to find another lead singer as gifted as Karen, and it would have been unwise for him to handle all of the leads himself, because his bland vocals convey little character. The soundest approach would have been to bring in guest vocalists, as instrumentalists like Quincy Jones, Sergio Mendes and Alan Parsons have done successfully in recent years.
Instead, Carpenter struck a compromise, singing six of the songs himself and bringing in Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield to sing one song each. Warwick sings the slow-boil ballad In Love Alone (the last song Carpenter and his longtime lyricist, John Bettis, wrote for Karen). Warwick gives the song a warm, understated reading, by turns brooding and soaring. The Springfield cut, Something in Your Eyes, is a lush, old-fashioned ballad, along the lines of I Just Fall in Love Again, which the Carpenters introduced 10 years ago.
Carpenter isn't the first pop composer without much of a voice. Burt Bacharach and Marvin Hamlisch aren't going to put Michael McDonald out of business, but they don't try to. They concentrate on what they do best - and so should Carpenter. The quality of the Warwick cut in particular indicates that he should produce other pop vocalists. The title track, a moody instrumental with wide-screen scope, suggests a talent for film scoring. Carpenter should pursue these and other career directions, rather than insist on being something he isn't.
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Buy: Richard Carpenter - Time CD |
Last changed: Sun Jul 8 18:37:40 EDT 2007
