Any unreleased tracks from Richard's "Time" album?

My favorite track on "Time" is Richard's tribute to Karen, "When Time Was All We Had," followed by "Something in Your Eyes" featuring Dusty Springfield. I also get a kick out of "Say Yeah" because it's unlike anything the Carpenters recorded but still an enjoyable arrangement. That's another reason I'm curious about unreleased "Time' tracks, Richard's willingness to try new things when it came to arranging songs for this project.
 
I try not to be too harsh regarding the Time LP.
My primary complaint--and, I echo same with Carpenters' recordings--
is that I never thought Richard's lead vocals were strong enough, or deep enough.
That said, I actually like a few of the oddball choices: Who Do You Love and Say Yeah, in particular.
Calling Your Name Again (LG: Tony Peluso) and I'm Still Not Over You (LG:Tim May) are nice pop songs.

My big takeaway regarding the LP is this--synthesizer:
Jim Cox is the "synthesizer programmer." He is credited on eight of the Time LP Songs.

As for the miniscule sales of the LP. How could it have been otherwise ?
No promotion, little radio-play, the general public barely knew it existed. Radio probably
had its mind made up long before this album 'hit the shelves." No matter what Richard would
have come up with--at that point in time--it was a no win situation. Dusty Springfield performs
Something In Your Eyes beautifully--and, it barely dented the charts. Thus, miniscule sales provide
no objective indication, whatsoever, regarding the pros and cons of the album.

I am not much of a fan of the LP, I simply do not see how it could have been otherwise !

 
I think the problem regarding promotion for the album is the inevitable spectre of his sister whenever he appeared to promote it. He did a couple of TV interviews for the album and I remember one where they played a snippet of “Time” as he walked on set, but as soon as he sat down, the music stopped and the interviewer started talking about Karen. There was very little to no focus on the main reason he was there - his own album.
 
I try not to be too harsh regarding the Time LP.
My primary complaint--and, I echo same with Carpenters' recordings--
is that I never thought Richard's lead vocals were strong enough, or deep enough.
That said, I actually like a few of the oddball choices: Who Do You Love and Say Yeah, in particular.
Calling Your Name Again (LG: Tony Peluso) and I'm Still Not Over You (LG:Tim May) are nice pop songs.

My big takeaway regarding the LP is this--synthesizer:
Jim Cox is the "synthesizer programmer." He is credited on eight of the Time LP Songs.

That was the sound back then. He was simply marching in step with what everyone else was doing at that point to attempt to be somewhat current.

As for the miniscule sales of the LP. How could it have been otherwise ?
No promotion, little radio-play, the general public barely knew it existed. Radio probably
had its mind made up long before this album 'hit the shelves." No matter what Richard would
have come up with--at that point in time--it was a no win situation. Dusty Springfield performs
Something In Your Eyes beautifully--and, it barely dented the charts. Thus, miniscule sales provide
no objective indication, whatsoever, regarding the pros and cons of the album.

I am not much of a fan of the LP, I simply do not see how it could have been otherwise !

In my insignificant opinion, there just wasn't anything to promote. Richard attempted hipness were a huge miscalculation, IMHO. Richard is extremely talented - no question there - but painfully uncool.

"Who Do You Love" is the sound of Richard completely out of his comfort zone and sounding as square as can be. We've talked about this tune before and what it needs. Mark Holden (the writer) knew what it needed and his version is a thousand times better than Richard's. My assumption is that A&M...ahem..."made suggestions" in order to try to make the record at least somewhat radio-friendly and this may have been one of said suggestions. Richard's production of the tune is completely leaden and the fun of the tune is all but stripped away both by the production and by Richard's uninvolved vocal.

I'm not as big of a fan of "Something In Your Eyes" as you are. Dusty's vocal sounds as "comp'd" (edited together virtually word-for-word to come up with a complete take) as it really is. At times, she sounds involved with it but at others, she doesn't. You really can't be that involved given the way her vocal was recorded (likely at her behest). I do like Richard's vocal arrangement but the tune itself is a slight update on the things he was already doing on "Made in America" with Karen. This is also one of the tunes that would have been better in John Bettis' hands as opposed to those of Pamela Philips-Oland. He's just s better lyricist than she is. There are some good lines here but there are also some really Hallmark-ian ones that are rather dubious (like the entire first verse). Regardless of the mushiness of some of Carpenters' stuff, the lyrics generally avoided greeting card sentiment. Oland bathed in them. She really blew it on "When Time Was All We Had" - a tune that should have been far more meaningful than it was but we get dross like "Your voice will be the sweetest sound I'll ever hear and yet/We knew somehow the song would never end/when time was all we had to spend". I'm assuming this was a tune that Bettis simply wasn't ready to write so Richard called on Oland to do it instead.

It then got worse on "Say Yeah" which Paul Janz wrote the changes and melody for. He had this dance track and Pamela clearly had no clue what to do with it. "Up and down/ring around the roses/you move in close/I come undone"? What? LOL!! She tried for a come hither lyric and sounds like housewife trying to "be wild". It's only made worse by Richard's lack of commitment to the lyric. At no point during the tune do I believe him. I don't believe that he's pining for this woman and needs an answer now. I only believe that he's making an attempt to sound cool.

The even bigger problem with this record not being addressed is that Carpenters were no longer selling albums and hadn't in years prior. If Karen can't sell albums, there was no way Richard was going to. I have to wonder why A&M allowed him to make a solo album in the first place. It was never going to sell no matter what he did or how he did it. Even if Karen had survived and Richard had made the album without the distraction of Karen's passing, it still wasn't going to sell. IMHO, Richard's album didn't flop because of the distraction of Karen's passing; it died Carpenters had long since fallen out of fashion.

Ed
 
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I always feel Richard should have released Say Yeah as a mystery white label 12" release or single under some alias like some artists did in the 80's/90's to dent the charts.As a stand alone song it's very different to what the public may have expected from Richard.
 
As is customary, Ed has produced insights aplenty regarding the Richard Carpenter solo LP (his post #29).
I enjoyed the analysis, Ed ! Not much I can add, you touched upon all of the important issues.

Richard Carpenter: “My intention was to get back into my music and create something new.”
It is of some efficacy to read the entire People Magazine article of the day (from which I took the above quote):
people.com/archive/four-years-after-his-sister-karens-death-singer-richard-carpenter-makes-his-debut-as-a-solo-act-vol-28-no-17/
 
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One cannot say they weren't selling "albums." While they were no longer the chart toppers that they once were (most #1 artists have a shelf life when it comes to number ones), they still sold records.
 
One cannot say they weren't selling "albums." While they were no longer the chart toppers that they once were (most #1 artists have a shelf life when it comes to number ones), they still sold records.

That's true up to a point, but their sales had fallen to a much lower level and seemed to have settled at that level for a few years - Passage and Made in America both failed to go gold and while Voice of the Heart did go gold, it took some years to build up those sales and didn't do so during its inital chart run.

Perhaps they could have carried on releasing albums that sold 200,000 copies or so, but that would have depended on whether their record label would have been happy with those figures, knowing that they were potentially capable of selling far more than that.
 
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