Karen Carpenter's song "Now"

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It means so much to me..



Its such a childish need to explain it, and to tell the story. I heard it a lot later than most of Karen’s songs.. I was 24 when I really realised what I was listening to, but id been listening to her sing since I was 5. This song ‘Now’ just got me.

It was the very last song Karen ever recorded before she died. She recorded it in New York and did it in one take..

The thing that you need to see, is the haunting sadness that was in her voice from the very start, she was starving herself and in the middle of a slow suicide that would take years to kill her. That sound in her voice.. while she sang the normal cheesy work of the carpenters has stood the test of time due to the quality of her tone…

That haunted heart of hers struggled alone in secret in every song.. her body was frail and crumbling in the later years like a roman ruin, but yet.. her voice continued to sound so nourished until the very end.
She had began to finally recover in 1983, realising her battle and started to deal with her illness. After all those years of secret heartache her mental illness was under control and she was happy.. hope had come back to her.

So she stepped back into the studio and recorded this song ‘now’

its a simple ballad about how a love has lifted her, about how every new moment is lit up by this love..

this new hope.. and how every moment in her life feels new…

How the nights where cold, her hand was un-held, and how winds blew through her……’until now’

Her new hope is in her voice.. and it is beautiful. It rises and peaks with a flourish


‘and now when I wake,
there's someone home…
ill never face the nights alone,
you gave me the courage I need to win.
to open my heart and let you in.
and I never really knew how
… until now’


And as the song winds down with her repeating ‘until now’ and we hear a clarinet take us away with a romantic sadness… and the song is finishing..

We have been given our last moments with Karen carpenter… the voice and the person. She has opened her soul to us for the last time and we wait for this song to end.. to fade.. and to leave us alone in silence.

But then probably my most favorite moment in any song in history… she comes back… for one last line.

Out of the fading song.. out of the music, out of the darkness of space and time.. Karen's voice comes back… though the melody.With probably the most beautiful quality than any song before it… she lifts her head and sings with a hauntingly yearning tone..dragging out each vowl... she sings..

‘No I never really knew how…. Until now”

and with that.

She is gone.

Weeks if not days later. Karen dropped dead suddenly of heart failure in her bedroom in her parents house in California.

Her heart had been starved and punished for so many years that her recovery overwhelmed it. The heart so full of hope in New York those weeks before… had been struggling within her… and stopped.

Leaving us without one of the most gifted voices we will ever hear.
But finally leaving her with some peace.
Everything about the carpenters was bitter sweet… and to me that is what I love.

and here it is.