On Influence: Remembering Karen Carpenter

 Sometimes influence arises from forgotten places. I realized this the other night, as I was cooking dinner and took a notion to re-listen to an album from my childhood.

I didn't have much access to pop music as a kid. I didn't possess my own radio, and my parents didn't like the ambient noise of the 70s, so I ended up knowing very little about my own time, other than what I could gather from public sound systems in grocery stores and such. I was greedy about what I could get.

One of the things I was allowed to listen to was to a Christmas gift from my cousins: a greatest hits LP, a Carpenters record. I played this record over and over. I listened to it constantly. I was so dumb that I didn't know that "Ticket to Ride" was a Beatles song. I thought it was a Carpenters song. I swallowed that album whole. I knew every weepy lyric, every swollen riff.

As I listen to it now, I recognize that 99 percent of those songs are garbage: ridiculous overproductions, sap-and-schlock songwriting, inconsequential covers. And yet there is Karen's voice. Rolling Stone has called her singing "impossibly lush and almost shockingly intimate. . .  Even the sappiest songs sound like she was staring directly into your eyes." I think this is an entirely accurate statement. Amid the pomposity of her brother's arrangements, that voice enters directly into my bloodstream, like a message I am writing to myself.

I think about the little girl I was, kneeling on the living room floor, busily coloring, and singing along with Karen . . . following the spirals of that sad contralto, enacting the cadence of her loneliness. I think about myself now, as a poet, and know that I have always wanted to write like I "was staring directly into your eyes." I was not reading poems then. I was listening to Karen Carpenter. And so she became my model for how to become a voice.

By the time she died, so young, so miserably, I had forgotten about her. I was in college; I was learning about all of the music I had missed: the blues, punk, the great rockers. Karen had become a sad, embarrassing side-note . . . or so I thought.

But influence is influence. I may love Jimi Hendrix and the Replacements more than the Carpenters, but Karen gave me something they did not. She gave my ear a pattern of sound that became the possibility of speech.