Mark-T
Well-Known Member
Thank you, Simon! And thank you, Chris, for the link!WARNING !
SPOILERS AHEAD !
The big takeaways from tonight's BBC Carpenters special with Richard Carpenter:
Richard has revealed that he has been working on new Christmas songs with several singers in the hope that they'll be picked up by mainstream current artists to cover and make hits. He feels that there are no new traditional sounding songs anymore, and the old songs just aren't well suited to today's artists.
He has also revealed that he would like to work on remixing the Carpenters Christmas music because he isn't happy with the reverb he added and would like to utilise the new technologies, like he did with the RPO album, especially on Karen's voice.
Richard has said he would like to work on a volume 2 of "Carpenters with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra" but that it depends on the "powers that be" and how well volume one ("if we can call it volume one!" he added) performs - which we know it did well, especially in the UK. He hopes so! He also confirmed one song that would be included in a second volume - Karen's final recording "Now".
He confirmed that he has archived, and owns copies of absolutely everything he and Karen ever recorded (so the Universal fire didn't erase the original Carpenters material) and consolidated that there are no more unreleased recordings worth releasing. He said if he could only save one thing from his collection it would be the Magic Lamp single recording of "Looking For Love" - of which he owns 10 pristine copies.
He revealed that he and Karen didn't even really celebrate after signing their recording contract with A&M Records on 22nd April 1969 and that they headed home to their parents, getting stuck in traffic on the freeway in a Ford that stalled when it was stationary for too long.
He also spoke with enormous gratitude of how successfully the RPO album has been and would like to thank all Carpenters fans for sticking with the music he and Karen made. He said it has been a long and hard 50 years of work and if only one thing could be remembered he hopes that it would be the talent his sister possessed with her voice.