YMMV / Carpenters

• Adaptation Displacement: For some reason, several of their covers are this in Asia. "Sing" is often credited to the Carpenters instead of Sesame Street in parts of the region. Ditto for several The Beatles numbers like "Ticket to Ride" and "Help!"
• Bizarro Episode: "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft", a cover of the power ballad of the same name by Klaatu, which was chosen as the first single to promote the Passage album, is about communicating with extra-terrestrial life. For a band whose oeuvre primarily consists of Silly Love Songs, the song stands out as a particularly strange entry in their catalogue.
• Common Knowledge: It has been widely reported that songwriter Tom Bahler wrote "She's Out of My Life," later a major hit for Michael Jackson, about his failed relationship with Karen. Bahler denies this was the case and says he wrote the song before he even met Karen.
• Covered Up:
  • Their Signature Song, "Close to You," was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David about seven years earlier and recorded by several other artists^note The first to record it was Richard Chamberlain. Yes, the actor. before they grabbed it and made it their own. (Bacharach praised their version, saying that his immediate reaction to hearing it was, "Man, this is just great! I completely blew it with Richard Chamberlain, but now someone else has come along and made a record so much better than mine.")
  • Many songs written (or co-written) by Paul Williams were popularized by the Carpenters in their heyday, including "We've Only Just Begun" and "Rainy Days and Mondays."
  • Similar to "Close to You", "Hurting Each Other" had been kicking around the music business for a few years with a few different versions (Jimmy Clanton did it first) before they hit with it.
  • The Carpenters are the most famous cover of Joe Raposo's "Sing", which has been covered by dozens of artists over the decades.
  • Their version of "Superstar" easily surpassed the original by Delaney & Bonnie. (even if some prefer the later Sonic Youth version)
  • "Top of the World" had an interesting journey to the top of the charts. The song was popular in concert, and the original recorded version from the A Song for You album became a hit single in Japan, but Richard Carpenter wasn't convinced of the song's hit potential in the U.S. until a cover version by Lynn Anderson became a major country and minor pop hit. Thus, Karen and Richard re-recorded the song for their first greatest-hits album and released the new version as a single, and the rest is history. (And in another case of cover displacement, some know Shonen Knife's cover better.)
  • Other Carpenters hits to outperform/overshadow previously recorded versions include "For All We Know" (written by two members of Bread, under pseudonyms, and featured in the movie Lovers and Other Strangers); "It's Going to Take Some Time" (a Carole King song from her 1971 album Music); "Sweet, Sweet Smile" (written by country-pop diva Juice Newton); and "Solitaire" (co-written by Neil Sedaka and previously a hit in Europe for Andy Williams).
• Funny Moments: One version of Let Me Be the One heard on the 40/40 compilation album has one funny "didn't see this coming" part after Karen sings the last "Let me be the one" line, which at the tail end, she ends up saying a different line while trying not to chuckle and ends on one more note she did to close the song.
  • Also in the Carpenters version of "Make Believe It's Your First Time" (not Karen's solo version), in which she says jokingly, "I've got to get in a serious mood here" (or something like that) before she starts singing.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In this case, Japanese love Carpenters. So much so that when "Yesterday Once More" and "I Need to Be in Love" were re-released there as a double A-side single in 1995 to promote a Japan-only greatest-hits album, it became one of the biggest-selling singles in Japanese history by an international artist.
  • Even more interesting is that their cover of Joe Raposo's "Sing" was used by Japanese video game programmer Hideo Kojima for the end credits of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.
  • Mariya Takeuchi wrote "Now", the final song Karen recorded.
  • Nobuo Uematsu cites them as one of his musical influences.
• Harsher in Hindsight: After her death dealing with her personal demons, songs like "Rainy Days and Mondays" take on a whole new context.
  • In the album Passage, Karen made a rendition of "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" (from Evita), a song that was sung from the viewpoint of Argentinian First Lady Eva Perón, who despite her initial goal of achieving fame and glory found her true calling to be with the people of her country. Surprisingly, both women came down with diseases (Eva's cervical cancer, Karen's anorexia) at the peak of their fame, and both of them succumbed at a young age in their thirties (Eva was 33, Karen not yet 33).
  • In the melancholy "Goodbye To Love": "No one ever cared if I should live or die..." Trust us, Karen. We absolutely do care.
  • Karen's solo album includes a song called "My Body Keeps Changing My Mind" - an interesting song title for an anorexic (though that's obviously not what the song is about).
• Mis-blamed: Some say that the reason Karen's disorder happened was because on one report where it said "Richard and his chubby little sister" (When Richard is the chubby one, not Karen). Karen Carpenter biographers, however, have never found any article stating such and believe it to be mythical, as her eating disorder did not develop until her mid-twenties and after years on a restrictive diet.
• Older Than They Think: The song "We've Only Just Begun" was originally written as a TV commercial jingle in 1970 for Crocker Bank (a local California bank that got bought out by Wells Fargo in 1986).
• Posthumous Popularity Potential: While the group was considered a laughing stock among many social circles during their peak, the general underlying tragedy of the siblings, especially for Karen, made the band become strongly reappraised after Karen's death, to the point where they are broadly beloved today.
• She Really Can Act: A lot of people, especially non-fans of the band, don't realise that Karen started out as the band's drummer as well as singer, and are startled to realize that She Really Could Play.^note Plenty of lead singers, such as Elvis Presley, sling a guitar around their neck and pretend to strum it now and again, but you can't be a singing drummer without being able to play the drums, because inept drumming is much more noticeable than inept guitar playing.
  • Could have been played straight if Karen had lived, as she did in fact consider pursuing an acting career, but never got the chance.
• Signature Song: "(They Long to Be) Close to You," just beats out "We've Only Just Begun" and "Yesterday Once More" for this honor.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Rainy Day and Mondays," "Superstar", "I Need to Be in Love", and "Crescent Noon".
  • "(They Long to Be) Close to You" is a happy tearjerker.
• Vindicated by History: A rock-oriented music press detested them in the late '60s and much of the '70s. Now, of course, they're one of the most beloved pop groups of their time.

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