...just saw that a book called Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter is coming out this July. If the cover is any indication (and the fact that her friend Dionne Warwick is involved), hopefully this will be a biography written with respect and consideration, not like the articles that ran in tabloids after Karen Carpenter passed away. Her lovely voice and music have often been overshadowed by her tragic death.

There's a Facebook page for the book:

http://www.facebook.com/search/?ref=search&q=little%20girl%20blue&init=quick#!/littlegirlbluekc?ref=search&sid=533065246.21501579..1

I remember a few weeks after she passed away, People magazine ran a cover article with a ghastly photo that was actually taken at a public appearance long before the last weeks of her death. Ironically, Karen Carpenter had physically "recovered," but the toll of intravenous 
feeding and sudden weight "gain" (what would still be under normal weight for most of us, but closer to a 'healthy' weight than it had been for her) on her tiny frame was too much for her heart.

In the more than 25 years since she died, the singer's life has been the brunt of eating disorder jokes and endless speculation about whether she also had bulimia. Sometimes lost in all of that is the fact that she was perhaps one of the greatest female vocalists of the 20th century....(of course I have loved the Carpenters since I was a child so I may be a bit biased)

On the Cars song Drive Benjamin Orr sounds mysterious, sad and all-too-knowing. Though Rick Ocasek is the name and face we usually put behind the wheel, I can't imagine anyone but Orr singing this track. It's probably one of the eeriest love songs (besides The Police's Every Breath You Take) to come out of the 80s and it's also one of the best (I think.)

Drive was the Cars' highest charting song in the United States. It was released in the summer of 1984 off their Heartbeat City album, but was still playing on the radio a lot when I started high school that fall.  For the longest time I associated it with everything that was weird, wonderful and upsetting about freshman year, but now I think of it as something else entirely.

It's not a sweet love song, it's not sugary or silly or cheesy...it's just brutally honest and yet...Rick Ocasek (who wrote it) talks of a love that never forgets and even as it has a bitter undertone, it's also about someone who still cares about the person who cast his love aside...

Of course, that's just my take...I may be reading too much into it. Besides, like any good song it's best to just let the sounds wash over you. 'Cause sometimes the whole reason we listen to music is so we can just be.

Some memories remain open wounds, even if they are really (in the long run) ridiculously unimportant ones from an equally ridiculous time in your past. You don't know they're still open until you hear an unexpected song in the supermarket or catch a glimpse of someone you had hoped you'd never see again as long as you lived...

Of course there are also those memories that come from out of nowhere without provocation or warning...somehow those are the worst ones...and like I do with other unwanted things rattling around inside my head, I just turn up the volume on my mp3 player and say, "I can't hear you!"

I know Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past!" But I disagree...we have to kill those pesky memories and show them who's boss once and for all. It's how we survive best.

I found Switched-On Bach at the library today and brought it home with me and I'm surprised at how much I hate it...I love Bach, but I guess I don't like the Moog Synthesizer...I've often hated things upon first listen, only to discover later I just didn't give them enough time...maybe that'll be the case with this?

"Air on The G String" is my favorite Bach, but this just doesn't sound like the G String I love....apparently, though, this album (first released in 1968) is quite popular in the classical music community and held in high regard...what am I missing?


for more info on the album:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-On_Bach

I listen to this album (and the follow-up Two Suns) all the time. Singer Natasha Khan has said in interviews that she wants to "convey the fine line between passion and violence" in her music...I don't think she's talking about guns or knives or fighting, but about the passion behind emotions that cause us to do horrible things we later regret...

My favorite song of hers, though, has very little to do with passion OR violence. Instead, it's about the opposite...indifference or more appropriately...what happens when we lose passion. In the somber and very surreal sounding "What's A Girl To Do" Khan is singing of how much she still wants to love. But the feelings have gone and to where she has no idea. I don't think any song has ever so beautifully captured the pain of falling OUT of love with someone else.

And while the passion is gone...all the things that takes its place (guilt, sadness that the person who once was your world now sparks so little in you) are crippling.


...
As for the rest of the album, one word can sum it up: wow!! Every song is a stunner and her cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire" is a revelation!!