Carpenters
Close to You

It's no coincidence that the ringtone of Marge Simpson's cellphone, Homer’s wife and mother to Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, one of the most intriguing, multifaceted, believable, entertaining, and instructive female fictional characters ever (more so than Lucia Mondella or Beatrice, or Penelope…), is the super classic “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” a masterpiece that partially titles, but more importantly, dominates from the height of its unsurpassable class and allure, this 1970 album, the second in the career of the American duo the Carpenters.

Curiously, at that time, the song was already seven or eight years old: its author, Burt Bacharach, initially entrusted it to the modest singer and actor Richard Chamberlain (the blonde, amorous priest of “The Thorn Birds”…), then to the trusted, world-class Black artist Dionne Warwick, and again to the English Dusty Springfield but nothing… no one really noticed it until then.

Finally put into the hands of these two siblings (she still in her twenties, a “singing drummer” as she liked to define herself; he a few years older with extensive studies in piano and harmony), the exquisite and sophisticated chord progression, the ingenious melody that rests upon it, even the sugary love lyrics find sublimation and charm.

Yes, the lyrics are sentimental, the music is adult, very adult and slightly mannered, with that aftertaste of old 1950s America, when jazz and its harmonic and melodic freedom had contaminated, indeed invaded light music too, but in the 1960s there were still artistic pockets where rock was not taking hold... In short, listened to superficially, “...Close to You” might be dismissed as an old-fashioned U.S. love song.

Yet it is miraculous, always: saved as it is by Karen Carpenter's sincere, straightforward, and linear interpretation, who adds no further saccharine by singing it simple, straightforward, rhythmic, without frills, and especially without gospel embellishments and giant vibratos and infinite glissandos typical of soul and rhythm & blues singing, often so virtuosic and ultimately cloying. Her singing is “white,” of a pop-jazz piece made cultured by the compositional wisdom of its white author, yet reverent to Black inventions.

Karen's voice is limited yet exquisite in tone; the still slight singing experience is forgiven by frankness and simplicity, which counterbalance the arrangement force (her brother Richard’s doing) that occurs here and there in the song, like the scholastic and uninspired flugelhorn solo while the key performs an orthodox but “certain” rise of a half tone, and then the super chorus at the end stretching the song another minute, when it already seemed nicely finished after a stop.

Nothing, it is an unforgettable, indispensable, unchallengeable piece: like “Penny Lane,” like “Paint It Black,” like “God Only Knows” or whatever you consider among the best pop singles of the sixties.

The rest of the album offers an almost continuous and eventually tiring sequence of sweet melodic lullabies, almost all of which are far from the harmonic-melodic magic of the resounding leading track mentioned above. Richard Carpenter stuffs it all with infinite vocal overdubs of himself and his sister, constantly supported by the large orchestra, composing a good half of the setlist and then once again relying on Bacharach (in the album’s other gem, the delightful, famous “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”), the Beatles (“Help,” in a full and willing version, naturally not up to Lennon’s spirited and powerful masterpiece), Tim Hardin for that “Reason to Believe” also covered the following year by Rod Stewart, and the songwriter duo Roger Nichols and Paul Williams who honestly pass by with their two songs like fresh water.

Curiously though, the album closes with a progressive (!) track complete with an extended flute solo and then electric piano over the continuing rolls on the “singing drummer's” toms. The whole appropriately titled “Another Song” (more than another song, I would say another type of song…)

Karen Carpenter died in 1983, at thirty-three. In the mystery that life and the psyche of each of us always are, success, fame, the recognition and affection of many admirers, the esteem, support, and maybe even envy of many colleagues in the music world, the professionalism of the doctors and institutions she turned to, were not enough: she was taken away by an incurable and devastating form of anorexia nervosa.

It's a sadness to see her in photos from when she was young and then towards the 1980s, progressively thinning and hollowing in her smile, from innocent and disarming to increasingly troubled and sick. What did she lack? But why?... Her brother, on the other hand, from the start indulged in all of the world’s drugs, is still alive and well and, I presume, enjoying a comfortable old age: he made it.

“(They Long to Be) Close to You” is not just a song: it’s a world, a lost world. The late 1960s/early 1970s suggestion it creates with each listen is unique, profound, and inextinguishable, for those who have the enzymes (and maybe the years under their belts) to grasp it.