⭐ Official Review [Album]: "LOVELINES" (SP-3931)

HOW WOULD YOU RATE THIS ALBUM?

  • ***** (BEST)

    Votes: 18 20.0%
  • ****

    Votes: 48 53.3%
  • ***

    Votes: 15 16.7%
  • **

    Votes: 8 8.9%
  • *

    Votes: 1 1.1%

  • Total voters
    90
Thanks for posting this - I'd read Richard had appeared on Wogan in 1989 but had never seen the interview.

Lovelines was available by this point (it had the same release date in the US and in the US), but the focus seemed to be on Richard promoting the Compact Disc Collection on this trip. He did an interview with Record Collector magazine (the UK equivalent of Goldmine) around this time and again, the focus of the interview was mainly on the box set, although Lovelines was also briefly mentioned.
 
What a delight to see that interview on Wogan again. Terry Wogan had the greatest admiration and love for their music and played it regularly on his BBC Radio 2 show. The line that I remembered all these years was “Karen would have loved the compact disc”.

Richard interviewed by Terry Wogan in the UK on this day in 1989, a couple of weeks after the release of "Lovelines" - I find it odd that the album was not mentioned, any ideas? Was it released a little bit later in the UK? "Lovelines" didn't chart in the UK until mid-January 1990 so maybe?

Lovelines wasn’t released in the UK until January 13, 1990, so he wouldn’t have been there to promote that. He was probably visiting the UK to promote the TV movie which aired New Year’s Eve, 1989 over here and which Terry mentioned.
 
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What a delight to see that interview on Wogan again. Terry Wogan had the greatest admiration and love for their music and played it regularly on his BBC Radio 2 show. The line that I remembered all these years was “Karen would have loved the compact disc”.



Lovelines wasn’t released in the UK until January 13, 1990, so he wouldn’t have been there to promote that. He was probably visiting the UK to promote the TV movie which aired New Year’s Eve, 1989 over here and which Terry mentioned.

Lovelines was definitely released in late 1989 in the UK. 13 January 1990 was the first (and only) week that it charted, but that was due to the spike in sales following the airing of 'The Karen Carpenter Story on ITV'. It was the only other Carpenters album in print and on the shelves alongside the two Singles albums, so got picked up by a few customers who were looking to buy whatever Carpenters albums the shops had in stock.
 
Lovelines was definitely released in late 1989 in the UK. 13 January 1990 was the first (and only) week that it charted, but that was due to the spike in sales following the airing of 'The Karen Carpenter Story on ITV'. It was the only other Carpenters album in print and on the shelves alongside the two Singles albums, so got picked up by a few customers who were looking to buy whatever Carpenters albums the shops had in stock.

I remember when I got mine, "Song for You" (stupid Polygram CD and their disc rot) was in print right along with it as was "Close to You", "Carpenters", and "Singles 69-73". I didn't see the others at that point in any store near me.

Ed
 
Best place I can find for this post. Richard interviewed by Terry Wogan in the UK on this day in 1989, a couple of weeks after the release of "Lovelines" - I find it odd that the album was not mentioned, any ideas? Was it released a little bit later in the UK? "Lovelines" didn't chart in the UK until mid-January 1990 so maybe?

It's sweet how Richard donated the Carpenters Compact Disc Collection to the BBC charity Children In Need.


Nice round of applause from the studio audience for Richard. Great to hear that...
 
Excellent review of the album below - in particular Karen’s solo selections - which I rediscovered on the Rolling Stones archive site. Some of you may not have read this before.

*****

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.

ROB HOERBURGER
February 8, 1990


 
In the latest rating of albums thread I put "Lovelines" in the no.1 position, with 7 songs I liked a lot, 2 of which - WHERE DO I GO FROM HERE and YOU'RE THE ONE - I rate among her finest recorded vocals ever. Yes, the finest singer of ballads of the 70s, indeed - or any other decade for that matter!

And no, her voice - that warm, resonant, soulful, gorgeous contralto - will certainly never go out of style. There can be no question about that.

But "Lovelines" is only a part of her epitaph. The complete epitaph is comprised of her whole incredible, beautiful, incomparable body of work.
 
I remember when I first heard it. I lived in a smallish town on the Saskatchewan prairies of Swift Current and we were heading to Regina (the Metropolis) to go visit my sister in a Foster Home....and it was a winter's day, snow blowing on the prairie highways....and then going into Regina and stopping in one of the malls there and finding LOVELINES....and on the way home, listening to it in the cassette player, and reading the liner notes....
 
Lovelines is really a lost album. Why these tracks were buried in the vaults for years is curious. With other artists, when you get posthumously released material it is usually the weaker stuff that definitely needed to be put in the vault. But in the Carpenters case we got the weak stuff on Made In America and then the really good material was left in the vault for years.

Also it’s too bad that more of Lovelines tracks were not anthologized. “The Uninvited Guest” was the B-side to the “If I Had You” cassette single in the US & Canada. The only anthology I can think of to have it is the PBS set. And then “Kiss Me The way You Did Last Night” would’ve made a great compilation title and headlining track.
 
Also it’s too bad that more of Lovelines tracks were not anthologized. “The Uninvited Guest” was the B-side to the “If I Had You” cassette single in the US & Canada. The only anthology I can think of to have it is the PBS set. And then “Kiss Me The way You Did Last Night” would’ve made a great compilation title and headlining track.

‘Kiss Me’ definitely deserved to be included on compilations, it’s such a shame more people haven’t heard it. It sits in that unfortunate category of never having been anthologised anywhere, but it would have been perfect for the 1997 Love Songs compilation.
 
‘Kiss Me’ definitely deserved to be included on compilations, it’s such a shame more people haven’t heard it. It sits in that unfortunate category of never having been anthologised anywhere, but it would have been perfect for the Love Songs compilation.
Although it did receive a remix in 98.

it would’ve also been great on the “Interpretations” CD, or even one of the “Gold” CD’s.
 
I’ve always wondered what that noise actually was - it’s really intrusive especially when listening on headphones. It sounds to me like a kick drum pedal thwacked at the wrong moment.
 
That's a really gray area that we called some of these noise-removal efforts a "remix". I've changed "Tryin'..." to read "cleanup" instead of remix, and I think that suits these efforts better. If you spot one of these that are still listed as remixes, let me know.
 
Well those noise removals just seem to be a part of Richard’s remix sessions, going all the way back to 1987 when he removed the bass line from “Baby It’s You” all the way upto 2018’s RPO when he was scrubbing away the air conditioning sounds.
 
That's a really gray area that we called some of these noise-removal efforts a "remix". I've changed "Tryin'..." to read "cleanup" instead of remix, and I think that suits these efforts better. If you spot one of these that are still listed as remixes, let me know.
"Clean up" is certainly more appropriate than the term "remix." Also, I love the "Lovelines" album and generally find Richard's mixes of the songs from Karen's solo album to be superior to the Phil Ramone mixes.
 
"Clean up" is certainly more appropriate than the term "remix." Also, I love the "Lovelines" album and generally find Richard's mixes of the songs from Karen's solo album to be superior to the Phil Ramone mixes.

I mostly do too. The only thing I don’t like is replacing Louis Johnson with a safer bass line from Joe Osborn on “If I Had You.” Richard’s mixing decisions were right on otherwise, IMHO.

Ed
 
I’ve never been a fan of that decision either. Louis Johnson went on to play bass on the Thriller album - that’s how good he is.
With the cold ending, maybe the original bass line just didn’t work and even just doing a re-record of like the last 10 seconds wasn’t working, so it may’ve been better to just redo the entire line so that it worked with the cold ending.
 
Has anyone seen this Japanese "Lovelines" promo CD? A friend of mine in Japan found it for me recently. The sleeve is a paper sleeve.

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Has anyone seen this Japanese "Lovelines" promo CD? A friend of mine in Japan found it for me recently. The sleeve is a paper sleeve.

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It looks like this corresponds to this Discogs link:

But also this same catalog number was for a non-promo CD:
 
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