Paul Simon’s brutal putdown of Karen Carpenter’s most famous solo song: “This stuff is awful!”
There’s no denying that Karen Carpenter had a wealth of musical talent, and that throughout her sadly short-lived career, she demonstrated this on plenty of occasions. Not only did she possess one of the most sublime voices with a unique contralto range, but she was an incredibly adept drummer as well, and used to flaunt both of these skills as one half of the sibling duo, The Carpenters.
Although contemporary critical reception of The Carpenters was not always positive, with many dismissing their brand of soft rock and pop as being too simplistic, bland and trite, many have come to reassess their brilliance in the years since, and their chart success as a group was certainly nothing to be scoffed at. While they didn’t always perform their own original compositions, the writing and arrangements of her brother, Richard, was perfectly suited to Karen’s style as a vocalist, and they’ve earned themselves plenty of retrospective praise for their contributions to popular music, especially during the 1970s.
In Karen’s personal life, she was known for having briefly dated fellow singer and songwriter Paul Simon, and you’d think that together, their artistry could’ve created plenty of hits had they chosen to work together. However, Carpenter’s ailing mental health and struggles with anorexia led her output to decline towards the end of the 1970s, and while the early part of the decade was characterised by The Carpenters’ prolific output, things began to slow down as her health deteriorated, meaning that her and Simon didn’t get much of an opportunity to work alongside each other.
However, it would appear that Simon may have dodged a bullet as far as he was concerned, as he paid Carpenter a visit in the studio in 1979 to see how she was getting on with the recording of her debut solo album and was decidedly unimpressed with what he heard. Having taken a break from recording alongside her brother while he was struggling with addiction problems, Carpenter chose to record an album of covers, which included an interpretation of Simon’s hit, ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’.
When Simon descended upon the studio to see how things were going with her solo venture, their supposedly close friendship was significantly tested when producer Glenn Berger played him what they had been working on together. Perhaps Simon thought that Carpenter was capable of far more and had hoped to hear her shine as a solo artist, but his disappointment in her recordings, especially her cover of his own work, was something that he wasn’t able to disguise.
According to Berger, Simon’s reaction was unsavoury to say the least, and from his accounts of the meeting, his comments went beyond what might be considered helpful criticism and into outright beratement. In Berger’s words, Simon spoke to Carpenter in “a voice that combined derision, snobbishness, concern, and alarm,” and exclaimed, “Karen, what are you doing? This stuff is awful!”
Berger would later state in his memoirs that Simon’s reaction was a little over the top, but that his objection wasn’t exactly inaccurate either, saying that “his insensitivity was stunning.” The most telling sign that Simon was correct about how poorly the sessions came out was that the album, Karen Carpenter, was never released until 17 years later, several years after Carpenter had passed away due to complications from anorexia. While it was clearly one of the low points of her career, this could possibly be one of the low points of Simon’s friendship and amicable feelings towards Carpenter, and whether or not his words were deserved or not, they’re still incredibly harsh.
