Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Hasn’t Richard said that she wasn’t taken with “Solitaire”?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?
The only one I know of for sure is ‘The Rainbow Connection’.
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 !
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.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.
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).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.
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.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.
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.
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 .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.