I figured, "Why not?" I sang it during a mother-daughter tea when I was in sixth grade. Within minutes, he was playing popular Carpenters tunes, including "Close to You." He urged me to sing along. I still have that 45 with its original, well-worn, just-about-coming-unglued cover.Ĭhris was soon sitting at the piano - enthusiastically sharing interesting facts about albums, covers and performances. I was a Carpenters fan back in the day and this scene sparked memories of my very first single, "Yesterday Once More," released in 1973. He's also a longtime moderator for a well-known Carpenters/A&M Records website. She doesn’t turn it into a masterpiece or anything, but she does what she can.Watch Video: Chris May's Carpenters CollectionĬhris, an accomplished pianist, can play every Carpenters song note for note. But Karen Carpenter’s vocal work is what ultimately saves “Top Of The World” from simper status. And Karen also sinks her teeth into the central chorus hook, which is a lot more immediate than much of what her group was offering up.Īlmost everything about “Top Of The World” speaks to a basic, surface-level idea of sophistication. On “Top Of The World,” she sings about finding some transporting level of happiness: “Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes / And I won’t be surprised if it’s a dream.” But Karen’s voice holds on the word “dream,” like she’s seizing on that as the likeliest possible explanation. Her voice is warm and controlled, and there’s an intelligent sparkle in it. Karen Carpenter had a way of finding a slight tinge of melancholy in songs that otherwise actively resisted the very existence of sadness. There’s a bland confidence to the song that’s almost admirable.
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It’s got a lush and confectionary arrangement, full of strings and organs and milky backup singers.
“Top Of The World” isn’t a ballad it’s a solid midtempo jam, with Hal Blaine drums that seem like they’re itching to speed up even further. So the Carpenters made “Top Of The World” a single, and it hit #1 after the album had already been out for a year and a half. But after the Carpenters’ 1972 album A Song For You came out, the country singer Lynn Anderson had a huge hit with a cover of “Top Of The World” - something that the Carpenters probably invited when they put pedal steel all over the original. When they wrote it, Bettis and Carpenter figured they’d written an album track, and they didn’t have any plans to release it as a single. Like “(They Long To Be) Close To You,” it’s a broad and unconflicted love song, simple to the point of being simplistic. Richard Carpenter co-wrote “Top Of The World” with John Bettis, a lyricist who worked with him on a whole lot of Carpenters songs. And “Top Of The World” has something that a whole lot of that ’70s soft rock lacks: A genuine hook. The Carpenters didn’t suddenly make any huge leaps into the unknown in the early ’70s, but they did find ways to subtly push their sound, adding occasional flourishes to their warm, welcoming little jingles. But compared to many of the imitators who followed them, the Carpenters’ music was often rich and layered and thoughtful. So the Carpenters were pioneers in the field of making boring and unthreatening music extremely popular. All of this makes logical sense, but it also means that a whole lot of extremely boring music did well on the charts. This generation was changing, and its music was changing, too. Even when the people making hits were different, they still came from that same generation. I think it’s striking that most of the artists with #1 singles in the ’60s were in their teens and 20s, while the people making hits in the ’70s tended to be in their 20s and 30s. They weren’t rebellious kids anymore, but they were still buying records. And this was the era when many baby boomers were graduating college and joining the workforce. After Vietnam and Watergate and a whole lot of assassinations, the world must’ve seemed like a dangerous and unpredictable place, so safe and predictable music probably felt like a balm. To judge by the pop charts, this was the time when the record-buying public needed to be soothed, not challenged. This column is on the precipice of 1974, a dark time for popular music.
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