Karen Carpenter and the Album They Didn’t Want to Release

In early Nineteen Eighty, Karen Carpenter sat inside A&M Records in Los Angeles and played the finished version of the most personal album she had ever made.

For the first time in her recording career, she had worked without her brother Richard overseeing the sessions. She had spent months in New York with producer Phil Ramone, exploring a more contemporary sound and proving to herself that she could make music independently.

When the playback ended, the reaction was devastating.

Ramone later remembered that the silence in the room was deafening.

Breaking Away From The Carpenters

Karen had never originally expected to become the famous voice at the front of The Carpenters.

Her first love was the drums. But as the duo became successful, her remarkable singing voice increasingly moved her from behind the kit to centre stage.

Richard controlled much of the musical operation, handling arrangements and production while Karen supplied the voice that became instantly recognisable around the world.

By the late Seventies, however, both were struggling under the pressures surrounding them. Richard’s dependency on prescription medication eventually led him to enter treatment in January Nineteen Seventy-Nine.

The Carpenters stopped working temporarily.

For Karen, that unexpected break presented an opportunity.

Eight Months in New York

Karen travelled to New York and began working with Phil Ramone, whose recent successes included Billy Joel’s The Stranger and 52nd Street.

The change was considerable.

Instead of recording within the familiar Carpenters environment, Karen worked with different musicians, experimented with new material and explored everything from intimate pop to funk and disco-influenced arrangements.

She recorded around twenty tracks while discovering what it was like to work without Richard beside her.

The project was also expensive. By the time it was completed, approximately half a million dollars had been spent, with Karen carrying most of the financial burden.

But she and Ramone believed in what they had made.

Karen Carpenter used The Carpenters’ temporary hiatus to make her first solo album.

The Playback That Changed Everything

Karen returned to Los Angeles with the completed album in early Nineteen Eighty.

Richard wasn’t convinced. He believed some of the material didn’t suit Karen’s voice and disliked aspects of the more contemporary production.

A&M founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss also had serious reservations.

For Karen, the reaction was particularly difficult because the album represented more than another collection of songs. It had been an opportunity to establish an identity outside the partnership that had defined her professional life.

Exactly who ultimately killed the project remains more complicated than the simple story that the record company rejected it.

Richard later maintained that Karen herself made the final decision to shelve the album after A&M suggested further recording. Others involved in the sessions remembered her being deeply disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm surrounding the record.

On the fifth of May Nineteen Eighty, Karen abandoned the project.

Returning to The Carpenters

Karen returned to working with Richard, and Made in America followed in Nineteen Eighty-One.

Away from music, her circumstances were becoming increasingly difficult. Her marriage to Thomas Burris deteriorated, while her long struggle with anorexia nervosa became increasingly dangerous.

In Nineteen Eighty-Two, Karen returned to New York for treatment. Her condition eventually became serious enough to require hospitalisation.

On the fourth of February Nineteen Eighty-Three, she collapsed at her parents’ home in California and died aged just thirty-two.

The solo album remained unreleased.

Karen’s Own Verdict

Before her death, Karen spoke to Phil Ramone again about their abandoned New York sessions.

Her opinion hadn’t changed.

Despite the reaction from the label and her brother, Ramone recalled Karen making it emphatically clear that she still believed they had made a great album.

That conversation casts the abandoned project in a different light. Karen hadn’t decided that her experiment away from The Carpenters had been an artistic failure.

She remained proud of it.

Seventeen Years Later

Some of the recordings gradually appeared after Karen’s death, but the complete project remained unavailable for years.

Finally, in October Nineteen Ninety-Six, A&M released Karen Carpenter in America — seventeen years after the sessions had taken place.

Reaction was divided. Some listeners welcomed the opportunity to hear Karen exploring a different musical identity, while others agreed that aspects of its late-Seventies production had aged.

But the argument over whether the album should have been released in Nineteen Eighty could no longer prevent people hearing it.

Karen Carpenter had spent much of her career working within a musical partnership dominated by a very specific sound.

For eight months in New York, she discovered what she could create without it.

It took seventeen years for everyone else to hear the result.