Monday, April 28, 2014

The Songs Our Parents Gave Us - The Carpenters

Like the writer, The Carpenters make me think of when I was growing up and particularly my mother who liked them. Again, it was one of the few records in our house. I think she probably played them while she was ironing too. I didn't live on a grotty estate like he did though. This is the first part of a longer Guardian article. Coincidentally it's also a Monday today though not a rainy one.
 

The songs our parents gave us

The music we grow up with shapes our tastes in later life, according to a study by Cornell University. We asked Guardian writers to tell us about the songs that take them back to their childhood homes

'My mother would listen to the Carpenters while ironing'

 
Of the handful of albums my parents owned, it was The Carpenters' Singles 1969-1973 that struck me the most. I remember being particularly fascinated by Rainy Days and Mondays. With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect it was because it was the first piece of music I had ever heard that appeared to perfectly suit the circumstances in which I heard it. My mother would listen to the Carpenters in the afternoon, while doing the ironing in the front room, and I remember thinking that was what the woman in the song was probably doing too. In my head she was singing it in in an anonymous house on a cul-de-sac in an estate like ours, while doing something boring like housework, in that awful, interminable dead zone between the lunchtime kids' programmes ending and the afternoon ones beginning. I never felt that about my parents' other records: I don't know what I thought the bloke singing Brown Sugar was doing, but I was pretty certain he wasn't ironing.

Something about the song's sadness, and its pertinence must have seeped into me. I started loving the Carpenters and never stopped, even when it was deeply uncool to do so (they never were and will never be, the kind of band it's OK for a teenage boy to like), even before I could dissect why I found their music so moving. The weird combination of velvety richness and ineffable melancholy in Karen Carpenter's voice, the way it tugs at the lushness of the arrangements, the nagging sense that, in this glossily perfect, light-entertainment soundworld, something is desperately wrong. I still love them today.Alexis Petridis

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