Only Yesterday
Richard Carpenter & John Bettis
After long enough of being alone,
Ev'ryone must face their share of loneliness.
In my own time nobody knew
the pain I was goin' thru,
And watin' was all my heart could do.
Hope was all I had until you came,
Maybe you can't see how much you mean to me.
You were the dawn breaking the night
The promise of morning light.
Filling the world surrounding me
Baby, baby,
your love's made me
free as a song,
singin' for ever.
(chorus)
Only yesterday when I was sad and I was lonely,
You showed me the way to leave the past
and all it's tears behind me.
Tomorrow maybe even brighter than today
since I threw my sadness away.
Only yesterday
(musical interlude)
Interview snippet
Vickie Dalen wrote:
This is a piece of an interview
that I was listening to one night, and this section I found interesting... hope
you enjoy it. It opens with Barry Manilow's I Write The
Songs
- Interviewer:
- We're chatting with the Carpenters today in our
current series of retrospective reviews - people we've talked to over the years
that we really go a kick out of, and we chatted with the
Carpenters on several occations, and the reason I wanted to
play that (the Manilow song) to open this segment with - I
talked to Karen once and I said "Did you ever hear a
song on the radio, Karen Carpenter, and thought to yourself
"Man, I wish I would have recorded that"?
- Karen:
- Mm..Hmm. That happens once a week! (laughs)
- Interviewer:
- Does it really?
- Richard:
- Oh, yeah.
- Karen:
- It's happened quite a bit.
- Richard:
- Sure, I Write The Songs is a perfect song for
Karen and, uh...
- Karen:
- Killing Me Softly?
- Richard:
- Oh, yeah! Killing Me Softly
- Interviewer:
- Yeah, yeah, that would have been a perfect...
- Karen:
- I wasn't in the right place at the right time. (laughs)
- Interviewer:
- You weren't on that airline that what's her name was...
- Richard:
- Roberta Flack, that's right...
- Interviewer:
- How about either of you, your biggest disappointment with regard for
a record you made that you had the greatest amount of enthusiasm over but for
whatever the reasons are, the public doesn't take to a recorded performance YOU
feel is perfect. It just for some reason didn't happen. This is going to be
"double 0 above 1" and we'll say it doesn't even ... well, maybe it hits the
top 10 but it doesn't reach your expectations...
- Richard:
- Yeah, Only Yesterday.
- Interviewer:
- Only Yesterday...
- Richard:
- Yeah.
- Karen:
- Went to 4
- Richard:
- Yeah, it did very well - it went to number 4
- Karen:
- It went to 3 below 1. (giggles)
- Richard:
- But, it sold over 600,000 copies, which is nice, umm...
- Karen:
- It's good, nice... yeah, we kinda thought that was going to do
it.
- Richard:
- I thought that one was really terrific.
Appearances
