It's no secret that the brother/sister duo known as Carpenters was a major influence on my musical evolution…so much so that I found it was affecting my direction too much. So, in wry awareness, I threw together this little homage. Not exactly a parody, but not serious, either.

One of the classes I took at St. Johns River Jr. College in Palatka, Florida was Voice. No, really! And I loved Carpenters, especially the way Karen could open her throat and drop to a deeper register (I now know that's called dropping into chest voice), since I could do that and, in my head at least, it sounded awesome. So that's how I sang in my Voice class.

The class was one-on-one with (I think his name was) Mr. Kora, who I now imagine was a former opera singer who found himself trying not to scream at students stylishly duplicating Joan Baez' vibrato or James Taylor's nasality. So when I did a Karen Carpenter "drop," that's probably what pushed him over the edge. "Vhat is that?" he asked in his Eastern European accent. "Oh," I said. "Karen Carpenter does that." "You want to sound like Karen Carpenter?" he replied, possibly having no idea who that was. "Then get a sex change operation."

Sounds Like

Carpenters