A Song For You

A republication

This morning I was sitting in front of the fireplace with coffee and two dozing cats. It’s a rainy day, it’s quiet, and I reached for Karen Carpenter.

If you believe that you don’t like The Carpenters, or if you only remember them as that “weird, square” brother-sister duo who sang treacly 70s tracks, I hope to persuade you to listen again.

This morning, it was this song.

I remember when Karen died in 1983, and I found it sad in my 8 year-old’s way, but it wasn’t until decades later that I understood what we had really lost.

The pining for Karen Carpenter is nostalgia, it’s respect for the immense and unique vocal talent, yes. But it is not only those things. It is a yearning for the quality described by a word that has been cheapened—authenticity.

Karen Carpenter’s work was authentic. Every emotion she sings is one she feels; you cannot fake this. And she’s singing directly to me, and directly to you. No other vocalist has achieved what she did.

God bless you, Karen, even though you’re not really here; it’s just the radio.

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“Pop singer Karen Carpenter died this morning from complications of anorexia nervosa.”

The sun was shining that morning in Anaheim while I listened to the perfectly made up KTLA anchor woman. It always seems to confuse a little when the weather is smiling on a sad day. I didn’t know it until years later, but Karen lived only 17 miles away in Downey.

While I was eating my cereal that morning Karen’s mother Agnes was finding her body in the upstairs closet on the floor. Though she had put on weight after treatment, the damage Karen did to her body through years of starvation and laxative abuse was too much for her heart.

Agnes Carpenter was said to be a cold, withholding woman—to her daughter. For the favored son, Richard, nothing could ever be enough.

Richard, a man with as much inborn talent as an arranger and piano player as Karen had as a vocalist, was supposed to be the star. Agnes wanted his name—and not Karen’s—in lights.

Karen didn’t see herself as a front woman either. She was a drum virtuosa playing in her brother’s band. But once anyone heard her voice, that was it. Karen Carpenter had a voice from God that comes along maybe once in a century. Maybe.

When she would call her mother excited that one of their singles had topped the charts, Agnes couldn’t manage a “good job.” Karen should have held the note a little longer. Couldn’t she do it over with a fuller voice?

In her final year, the Carpenter family went to therapy together. Mom, dad, Karen and Richard. As the story goes, the therapist told Agnes he thought that Karen really needed to hear her mother tell her that she loved her.

"Well, I’m from the North, and we just don’t do things that way.”

Anorexia was only the proximate cause of Karen’s death. She died for lack of her mother’s love.

At eight years old I was a little sad, but not the way I would be later as an adult when I rediscovered the Carpenters. To me that morning, Karen was the lady with the prettiest voice in the world who sang the Sesame Street song.

Sing. Sing a song. Sing out loud. Sing out strong. Sing of good things, not bad. Sing of happy, not sad.

The Carpenters were everywhere in the 1970s. We’ve Only Just Begun was everyone’s wedding song. Turn on a tinny AM radio in any car and out came her velvet syrup voice, double-tracked in that signature way.

As with disco, it became fashionable to “hate” the Carpenters. There were vanilla. They were corny. They dressed like models for the Mormon JC Penney catalog.

And, yes, though few said it, many detected something off with that family. Something better passed over with a light smile and a change of subject.

Fashions peak, and then they trough. Sooner or later, yesterday’s cornball popular music is allowed to be enjoyed again unironically.

Sometime in college I heard Karen singing Superstar on the radio. It had been years, maybe 15, since I’d heard that song.

It arrested me. Her voice. My God—how did I never hear it this way before? No other vocalist could do what Karen did. When she sings, she is singing directly to you, personally. You can understand every word she sings because she enunciated, a lost art today.

But more, you can hear and feel every emotion directly. Her phrasing, the catches in her breath, the control of the color of the last note in a line—you can’t learn to do what Karen did naturally.

A friend who is mainly into hard rock confessed a regard for Karen Carpenter recently, but he said he couldn’t listen to her. “It hurts too much. You don’t sing like that without having extraordinary pain, and it’s right in your face with Karen.”

That’s part of why I keep going back to her; I worry emotional wounds the way some people can’t stop probing a canker sore with their tongues. In college I started buying Carpenters CDs and listening to their entire back catalog. I am an unironic, unashamed Carpenters fan.

Richard’s arrangements, bound in time though they are to the dated conventions of their decade, are brilliant. But it’s Karen’s voice in the center. As she said when asked why most of her songs were written to feature her lower register, “That’s where the money is.”

When I’m blue, I want Karen. When I’m sad or scared, I want Karen. When I’m alone and listening to her sing, it’s like being sung to by a mother.

There’s another thing I want that can’t happen. I want to hold Karen and tell her it will be OK, and that it’s not her fault.

You’ve Got to Love Me for What I Am

This past fall I pulled over to an antique store on Route 2 where the suburbs give way to the New England countryside. The store was open, and so was the overflow garage where unsorted items waited to be priced.

Tucked between a pewter candle stick and a paper hand fan were eight 45 rpm records in their sleeves. They could have been plucked from my own record collection in 1984. Olivia Newton-John, Teena Marie, The Romantics, and The Carpenters.

The song was Solitaire.

I got the records home and enjoyed them that afternoon. A few days later I went through them to see what tracks were on the B side.

The Carpenters’ B-Side was Love Me for What I Am. Oddly, I’d never heard it.

The first listen didn’t grab me. But I listened again and the song started to grow on me. Now I can’t get it out of my mind.

We fell in love
On the first night that we met
Together we've been happy
I have very few regrets

The ordinary problems
Have not been hard to face
But lately little changes
Have been slowly taking place

It sounds an awful lot like what happens when you fall in love with a narcissist. “Love at first sight” sounds better on the page than it wears on the street, or in the bedroom. When we “fall in love at first sight” there’s a good chance we’re falling into trauma-bonding. Something in his manner seems familiar, exciting, maybe even breath-taking. Something we know from home.

Little changes start to take place a few months in. Maybe up to a year.

You're always finding something
Is wrong in what I do
But you can't rearrange my life
Because it pleases you

The clients who come to me for coaching on family and relationship troubles are often waking up to something sorrowful.* If they come from an abusive or neglectful home, they almost always pick a partner who is a romantic version of the mother or father whose love they could not earn.

It feels wonderful in the beginning. I remember the elation of being “in love.” It was the most intensely pleasurable feeling. And it wasn’t real.

When you love a narcissist, you love someone who cannot love you back. You love someone who may think he loves you; maybe he even wants to love you. But he can’t.

Because to a narcissist, you are not a real and whole person. He doesn’t grasp that you are a whole, conscious person with your own ability to experience pain, pleasure, regret, hope. Narcissists lack theory of mind—they don’t truly see other humans as full humans they way they think they see themselves.

And if you're only using me
To feed your fantasy
You're really not in love
So let me go, I must be free

Karen is right. But what she sings she should say to herself, and you should say to yourself, too.

If the object of your affection is a narcissist, you’re not really in love. You, too, are using him to feed your fantasy. He may be cruel while you are not. But you are just as surely deceiving yourself about who you are and what you are doing as he is deceptive about himself.

Do you need to be free? Then you must free yourself. You cannot wait for him to let you go. He may not. Or he may reject you outright, and you are left to inventory your deficiencies to find the rotten part that makes you unable to be loved.

This is no way to live. It is to disrespect one’s self, to treat one’s self cruelly and lightly.

To borrow once more from Karen, what you are you have to be.

*If you are interested in booking a consulting session, please visit joshuaslocum.net.

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