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    Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter
    Unavailable
    Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter
    Unavailable
    Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter
    Ebook500 pages7 hours

    Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter

    By Randy Schmidt

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

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    About this ebook

    Karen Carpenter was the instantly recognisable lead singer of the Carpenters. The top-selling American musical act of the 1970s, they delivered the love songs that defined a generation. Karen's velvety voice on a string of 16 consecutive Top 20 hits from 1970 to 1976 – including Close to You, We've Only Just Begun, Rainy Days and Mondays, Superstar, and Hurting Each Other – propelled the duo to worldwide stardom and record sales of over 100 million.

    Karen's musical career was short – only 13 years. During that time, the Carpenters released 10 studio albums, toured more than 200 days a year, taped five television specials, and won three Grammys and an American Music Award. But that's only part of Karen's story. As the world received news of her death at 32 years of age in 1983, she became the proverbial poster child for anorexia nervosa.

    Little Girl Blue is an intimate profile of Karen Carpenter, a girl from a modest Connecticut upbringing who became a Superstar.

    Based on exclusive interviews with nearly 100 friends and associates, including record producers, studio musicians, songwriters, television directors, photographers, radio personalities, classmates, childhood friends, neighbours, personal assistants, romantic interests, hairdressers, and housekeepers.'...thorough and affectionate biography of a singer who's been constantly undervalued by the music industry.' MOJO

    'Schmidt cannot be faulted... carefully factual, sensitively pitched book.' The Word

    'The first truly convincing account of her nightmarish story.' The Guardian
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOmnibus Press
    Release dateMar 7, 2012
    ISBN9780857127693
    Unavailable
    Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter

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    Reviews for Little Girl Blue

    4/5

    41 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Well researched and fair. Randy Schmidt's biography of Karen Carpenter digs deep into her life and reveals a Karen Carpenter her fans did not know. Interviewing family and friends, some of whom had never been interviewed before, Schmidt tells of Karen's life, her music, her unhappy marriage, her long battle with anorexia and ultimately her death.Karen Carpenter's death was one of those where I can remember just where I was when I heard the news. Although her life ended tragically too young, she left a legacy of music that few can rival.
    • 4/5
      Well done book on the tragic life of Karen Carpenter of The Carpenters. Her beautiful voice is remembered still by many today, yet, it seemed her family, especially her mother, did not value her talents and preferred to push brother Richard, who indeed is a talented pianist and arranger. Yet, when Karen got the spotlight, she also began her drastic weight loss measures that resulted in her death. The book is well researched with many interviews with those who worked and knew Carpenter.
    • 4/5
      I thought this book was a sad, but well-researched retelling of Karen Carpenter's life and tragic death. The author did not have her family's cooperation (her passive father and domineering mother are long dead. Brother Richard didn't want anything to do with it), but he did have access to two of her close friends. I have the impression that no one ever knew Karen Carpenter very well. The last third of the book was very sad: She was defeated she was by the shelving of her solo album, followed by the failure of her impulsive marriage to a man who was not what he seemed. Her therapist at the time (a man who had made a name for himself in the then-obscure field of eating disorders) advocated a treatment approach that required the patient to become dependent on the therapist. It was perhaps the opposite of what Carpenter needed.
    • 4/5
      Unlike the recent 'biography' of Freddie Mercury, which made me angry with the laziness of the authors, this objective study of Karen Carpenter stirred different emotions - sadness, of course, but also frustration. I wanted to go back in time and smack her mother and brother's heads together for feeding Karen's demons and then doing nothing to halt the tragic spiral of self-doubt and self-harm that eventually killed her. For me, and I suspect for most people, Karen was the Carpenters, with her beautiful voice. Richard might have been a great pianist and composer - of other people's songs (I wasn't aware that nearly all of their catalogue of hits were covers or written by other lyricists - not a crime, but I'm a fan of Queen, who wrote all their own material) - but she was the star. To quote Richard, I am very much 'Team Karen' - he's probably not as black as he's painted, but he could have encouraged his sister instead of holding her back to further his own career. And Agnes, Richard and Karen's mother, was probably the original 'soccer mom' - for her son's benefit, at least. Horrible woman - the biopic was spot on. Yes, the Carpenters were MOR, no, they didn't write original songs, yes, they got stuck in a rut - but who can listen to Karen's soulful, emotional voice and not be moved, whether to sing along or just listen with a smile? Her death at 32 from a disease that nobody really understood, after being taken advantage of by those closest to her for most of her life, is one of music's great losses.