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Is the only thing different the direction of the stereo signals, yet the recording the same? I only listened on my iPhone and it sounded as I remember it from the A Song For You LP as far as the piece goes. Guess I need to take things out and compare so I am not confused. Flat Baroque is best for me on Live at the Palladium as it opens the concert. With Baroque being my favorite period in music history, I have always liked this tune. Which brings me to back to why I always enjoy the Carpenters. They showcase music of every type and style which helps take the listener to different places, while doing it in good taste and good musicianship, which, in turn, can lead to the attraction and development of new musicians. It is the base I stood on as a teenager as I defended the Carpenters and their musical influence. There are few who can claim this!
I forgot to thank A&M Retro again for bringing this up it wasn't until his last post here that it dawned on me about this 45 single. I really didn't visit the single of Flat Baroque often so it was easily missed and forgotten.
Yep. Faster. We'd talked before about how in live shows, a performer often gets that adrenaline pumping and goes into hyperdrive and the songs come out extremely fast. Also, with the constant performing and rehearsing comes a familiarity with a piece that allows a bit of showmanship as to how fast it can be performed. These factors often affected songs that were fast to begin with, like "Mr. Guder", the "Bacharach Medley" and "Flat Baroque".
Harry
While revisiting--and comparing with--
Flat Baroque,
as performed on the Live At The Palladium LP,
is it me, or is the song played far too fast in 1976 ?
I assume that it was purposeful for the Concert, but....
I had not known the song could get more distasteful to me !
The title track of a "A Song For You" should have been the second single instead of "It's Going To Take Some Time". A much stronger song with a message that would have resonated like many of their hits. It is far less Adult Contemporary and that vocal take is pristine. Richard has said the song was too long but a great edit could have been easily achieved. I think it would have been assured a Top 3 position and helped the chart position of the "A Song For You" album which stopped at No. 4, lower than expected given the Tan Album sales.
One song that I'm surprised didn't get an A-side release was "Crystal Lullaby". It's almost a duet between the two, and every time that I hear it, I'm reminded of "The Tin Soldier" and an old stage adaptation I saw on CBC years ago.
With Crystal Lullaby, I always wondered whether the Carpenters ever had a thought of putting out an album aimed at children.
It's a deceptively difficult song to edit, the only way you could do it is to cut in at the line "You came out in front and I was hiding" and splice it back where Karen comes in with that line a second time. The drawback is that it cuts out the entire sax solo and brings the song down to about 2m30s, effectively ruining it. This is what they did for the performance of the song on The Bob Hope Special in 1972. A shame, because it would have been perfect as a single and no doubt would have scored them another top 5 hit.
Nobody would get any argument from me about ASFY being a great song and an excellent performance by K&R, but it's just not "hit single" material. As stated above, it doesn't have a melodic hook, and it's too slow for mainstream radio. Trust me on this one: the sax solo, terrific as it is, would have had people tuning out in droves. The soft, cold opening would have also worked against it for radio play. The length wouldn't have been too much of an issue as singles were getting longer by this time (after all, the Beatles topped 7 minutes years earlier with "Hey Jude").
Now having said all of that, it IS possible they could have turned it into an FM hit. For those readers who aren't ancient, FM in those days was way more "freeform" and the format loved songs that were moody, or longer, or had interesting arrangements -- all of which ASFY has. The thing that would have worked against FM action happening, however, is the Carpenters' pesky image -- FM was all about "cool" acts, not necessarily singles acts, so they were either too white-bread or too mainstream for FM at that time
Bottom line, as great as "A Song For You" is, many songs just work better as album cuts and that's one of them.