“What I’ve got they used to call the blues”: and these days, they call it something else, but exactly what is an open question. One of the effects of the economy and understatement of Karen’s performance is that you’re not quite sure of the real extent of the misery the singer is feeling: it could be anything from mild ennui to clinical depression. But it’s not just the biographical fallacy that sways me more to the latter end of the spectrum (unfortunately, every single Carpenters song has to submit to being read as a coded harbinger of fate).
What makes this song one of the greatest ever about depression is the way its easy-listening template allows it to evoke numbness, boredom, anhedonia. An inability to feel is after all one of the main symptoms of depression, which ought to make litotes (rhetorical understatement) one of its master tropes…if it were, music in general would be a lot less lugubrious. Here, though, the sense that what’s being said is standing in for something darker even carries through to the supposedly hopeful middle eight, where, we are told, Karen is comforted by the thought of “the one who loves me”–has any such appeal ever sounded less convincing? It might just be that this is a weak part of the song, but given the sublime beauty of the rest of it I’m prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt here: we are going through the motions on purpose.
In a performance that relies on understatement, small gestures come to the fore: here it’s the slight vibrato on “hanging around”, the plangent harmonica melody, and the very odd, sudden mid-note sforzando on the very last word (”dowwwwwwwwwwwOWWWWWwwwwwwwwn”), an effect I’m unaware of having heard in any other pop song.
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