⭐ Official Review [Album]: "VOICE OF THE HEART" (SP-4954)

HOW WOULD YOU RATE THIS ALBUM?

  • ***** (BEST)

    Votes: 19 17.8%
  • ****

    Votes: 39 36.4%
  • ***

    Votes: 39 36.4%
  • **

    Votes: 7 6.5%
  • *

    Votes: 3 2.8%

  • Total voters
    107
I wonder... is there confirmation of any songs that CARPENTERS recorded that Karen did not believe in, voiced her feelings that she did not want to record and was over ridden by the executive producer and was required to?
 
I wonder... is there confirmation of any songs that CARPENTERS recorded that Karen did not believe in, voiced her feelings that she did not want to record and was over ridden by the executive producer and was required to?
Hasn’t Richard said that she wasn’t taken with “Solitaire”?
 
Here’s Richard’s comment from the Gold 35th CD for ‘Solitaire’

‘This is one of Karen’s finest performances, even though, to my amazement, she was not that taken with the song.‘
 
The only one I know of for sure is ‘The Rainbow Connection’.

That one didn't surprise me in the least. She sang it like it she didn't really like it. Not one of her better moments. I doubt she'd be too thrilled to know it's out there. Richard didn't know what to do with it either so it's a failure on all fronts for me, IMHO.

Ed
 
Carpenters Voice of the Heart Review
RPM Canada Nov 12, 1983

ATwssLY.png
 
Pulling this thread up. Today marks 37 years since the album was released. It charted at #6 in the UK and by November was certified gold becoming the 38th best selling album of the year !

Yes, it did do quite well in the UK - in the end I think sales were over 200,000, which was way higher than those for Passage and Made in America. Not quite sure why - Richard did come over to do some TV promo and 'Make Believe It's Your First Time' got some radio play and a brief chart appearance, but nothing majorly different from how previous albums had been marketed.

I think I'm right in saying too that despite its rather disappointing chart performance in the US, the last album of theirs to have had a longer run than Voice of the Heart on the Billboard album charts was Horizon?
 
Yes, it did do quite well in the UK - in the end I think sales were over 200,000, which was way higher than those for Passage and Made in America. Not quite sure why - Richard did come over to do some TV promo and 'Make Believe It's Your First Time' got some radio play and a brief chart appearance, but nothing majorly different from how previous albums had been marketed.

I think I'm right in saying too that despite its rather disappointing chart performance in the US, the last album of theirs to have had a longer run than Voice of the Heart on the Billboard album charts was Horizon?
What about the 1984 Christmas Portrait Special Edition. Considering that back in 1978 the original only hit #145 on the album charts, but in January 2020 the 1984 version hit #56, 35 years after it was released. Yeah it hasn’t been on constantly, but especially over the past decade it’s been re-entering Billboard’s album charts, that’s quite a long run for an album.
 
What about the 1984 Christmas Portrait Special Edition. Considering that back in 1978 the original only hit #145 on the album charts, but in January 2020 the 1984 version hit #56, 35 years after it was released. Yeah it hasn’t been on constantly, but especially over the past decade it’s been re-entering Billboard’s album charts, that’s quite a long run for an album.

Christmas Portrait may have racked up more weeks on the chart than Voice of the Heart now, but that's largely due to a change in the Billboard rules some years ago, which allowed catalog albums to re-chart on the main album chart that wouldn't have been eligible to do so beforehand.
The point I was making was about initial chart runs.

You do raise an interesting side-point though - were sales of the 1996 Christmas Collection also contributing towards the chart position for Christmas Portrait on the US charts?
 
Christmas Portrait may have racked up more weeks on the chart than Voice of the Heart now, but that's largely due to a change in the Billboard rules some years ago, which allowed catalog albums to re-chart on the main album chart that wouldn't have been eligible to do so beforehand.
The point I was making was about initial chart runs.

You do raise an interesting side-point though - were sales of the 1996 Christmas Collection also contributing towards the chart position for Christmas Portrait on the US charts?
With “Christmas Collection” it would be listed as Collection, so CP and “An Old-Fashioned Christmas” wouldn’t be counted as seperate albums. So it wouldn’t contribute to CP’s chart action (I just looked on iTunes, and in Canada iTunes only lists “Christmas Portrait Special Edition” & “Christmas Collection”, and when I clicked on the Collection, it didn’t even list the separate album names—-although confusingly they restarted the numbers with “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear”, which was AOFC first track, but without the album name it’s odd).

So for the past 20 years, ever since the cassette versions went out of print around-2000, neither original Christmas album has been available seperatley for North American charts. So all the recent chart action for CP has been the 1984 Special Edition.
 
With “Christmas Collection” it would be listed as Collection, so CP and “An Old-Fashioned Christmas” wouldn’t be counted as seperate albums. So it wouldn’t contribute to CP’s chart action (I just looked on iTunes, and in Canada iTunes only lists “Christmas Portrait Special Edition” & “Christmas Collection”, and when I clicked on the Collection, it didn’t even list the separate album names—-although confusingly they restarted the numbers with “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear”, which was AOFC first track, but without the album name it’s odd).

So for the past 20 years, ever since the cassette versions went out of print around-2000, neither original Christmas album has been available seperatley for North American charts. So all the recent chart action for CP has been the 1984 Special Edition.

So the Christmas Collection has never seen any chart action on Billboard in its own right since its release then?
 
So the Christmas Collection has never seen any chart action on Billboard in its own right since its release then?
Not as far as I am aware. But at the same time I’ve only seen CC in stores like twice since 1998, whereas I’ve seen CPSE at least once about every year here in Canada.
 
Not as far as I am aware. But at the same time I’ve only seen CC in stores like twice since 1998, whereas I’ve seen CPSE at least once about every year here in Canada.

Maybe it was different in different markets. In the UK I don't think the Christmas Collection has ever gone out of print since 1996, albeit that it's now in a single CD case rather than the fatbox CD case that was used for its initial pressings in the 1990s.

The special edition of Christmas Portrait seemed to vanish from UK stores for about a decade from the late 1990s to the early 2000s (it wasn't part of the Remastered Classics reissue series and presumably at that stage, with the Christmas Collection now available, the record company didn't see the need in having two Christmas albums in print at the same time). Then it started reappearing in stores in the late 2000s. Not sure what the position was/is re the availability of these two in the US.
 
The special edition of Christmas Portrait seemed to vanish from UK stores for about a decade from the late 1990s to the early 2000s (it wasn't part of the Remastered Classics reissue series and presumably at that stage, with the Christmas Collection now available, the record company didn't see the need in having two Christmas albums in print at the same time). Then it started reappearing in stores in the late 2000s.

That’s strange because you would have thought the special edition would have been withdrawn from print precisely because the double CD collection with each separate album was now out there.
 
The single CD sells for less than the double CD, so having that Special Edition constantly in print is essentially more for the casual fan.
 
Maybe it was different in different markets. In the UK I don't think the Christmas Collection has ever gone out of print since 1996, albeit that it's now in a single CD case rather than the fatbox CD case that was used for its initial pressings in the 1990s.

The special edition of Christmas Portrait seemed to vanish from UK stores for about a decade from the late 1990s to the early 2000s (it wasn't part of the Remastered Classics reissue series and presumably at that stage, with the Christmas Collection now available, the record company didn't see the need in having two Christmas albums in print at the same time). Then it started reappearing in stores in the late 2000s. Not sure what the position was/is re the availability of these two in the US.
It’s funny, but I was just on Amazon.com and “Christmas Collection” appears to be out-of-print on CD (i can only find MP3 or Streaming options from Amazon, but the CD is only available from 3rd-party sellers) in the US, while the “Christmas Portrait Special Edition” CD is still in-print .

But I remember back in 1997, I tried to order it in at the local record store (that was here in Canada and was on their order forms) that Christmas and they were told about 2 weeks before Christmas that it was out-of-print, but they were still able to get it through their chain, but it didn’t arrive until like February or March (by which time my mom picked it up and gave it to me for my birthday in April). Of course I found “An Old-Fashioned Christmas” on cassette at a local K-Mart during Boxing Week 1997 which was ironic (of course I didn’t even know what was on Collection by that point since I only knew the title and that it was 2-disc. At this point I thought it was another Christmas album that wouldn’t contain any tracks from CPSE or maybe a few re-records I had no idea.).

But Collection seems to be like a Disney movie, it’ll be released every so often them go back in the Universal vault.
 
Back
Top Bottom