I love 'Last One Singin' as well. A great way to finish off the album, although there is something quite sad about it as well in hindsight, given what happened to the project.
Gary, thanks for the
Daily Gazette review. It's nice to see that the album did attract some positive reviews on its release that pick up on what I feel are some of the album's strengths. It rather reminded me of
Rolling Stone's quite positive review of
Lovelines from 1990 that singled out the four solo tracks as highlights and gives quite an insightful perspective on their potential. Don't know if it's been posted here before, so here it is:
Where have you gone, Spiro Agnew? Our nation clamors for 1972: Donny Osmond lands a Number Three single, Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors cause the greatest stir at the U.S. Open, and
The Karen Carpenter Story hits near the top of the Nielsen ratings. Though the TV movie ended with the singer's death in 1983,
Lovelines offers the fantasy sequel: Karen lives, goes out on her own and becomes reasonably ... hip.
Karen did in fact make one solo album in 1980, with many of the musicians who had just finished working on Michael Jackson's
Off the Wall; it was produced by the Quincy Jones of the East Coast, Phil Ramone. Four of those unreleased cuts surface on
Lovelines, and they are liberating. Ramone recorded her in leaner, decidedly unsaccharine settings and, in effect, got rid of her music's otherwise characteristic bad aftertaste. As Karen's cozy contralto pulses through the come-hither "Lovelines," the hearth-warm "If We Try" (both written by Rod Temperton, whose credits also include "Rock With You" and "Thriller") and the saltier "If I Had You," her vocals come damn close to soulful. Listening to them, it becomes apparent why singers like Chrissie Hynde, Madonna and Gloria Estefan have "come out of the closet" and admitted they were Karen fans.
Richard Carpenter has apparently deemed the rest of the solo album inappropriate for release (among the still-shelved tracks are a Cars-like rocker, "I'm Still in Love With You," and a mad disco romp, "My Body Keeps Changing My Mind"), but at least he had the sense to tone down his usual Disneyesque flourishes and milky choirs for the rest of
Lovelines, which consists of unreleased Carpenters tracks recorded between 1977 and 1980. The best of these are "Where Do I Go From Here?" and "You're the One," which both reaffirm that Karen was the finest ballad singer of the 1970s: No one could fill up, and out, a melody or cut to the blood and guts of the ickiest love song as she could. In fact, voices like Karen Carpenter's never really go out of style;
Lovelines reveals just a few of the avenues that would have been open to her. But sadly, the Seventies never really ended for Karen Carpenter; she died before she could shed the goody-two-shoes image that shrouded her immense talent. As such,
Lovelines becomes her essential epitaph. (RS 571)
ROB HOERBURGER
http://archive.today/3pRDn#selection-677.0-672.7