They Said It Was Nuts: The Battles Behind The Carpenters’ ‘Sing’

Every long career has one record that the faithful defend and the detractors quote as evidence, and for the Carpenters that record is “Sing”. In the spring of 1973, at the absolute summit of their commercial power — three years of unbroken hits, a voice that had become the sound of American easy listening, a new album about to spend the summer at number two — Karen and Richard Carpenter chose as their lead single a song written for preschoolers. “Sing” came from Sesame Street. It had been sung by puppets. Their own associates, by the duo’s later admission, thought they were nuts. And the record-buying public, confounding everyone, sent it to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and kept it at number one on the easy listening chart, making it their seventh gold single. The battle over “Sing” was never really about a song. It was about the question that hung over the Carpenters’ entire career: were they artists of genuine depth working in a gentle idiom, or were they the most successful children’s entertainers in adult clothing? “Sing” forced the question into the open — and then, across fifty years, quietly won the argument.

This is the story of how a television composer’s little hymn to courage traveled from a Manhattan studio full of Muppets to the top of the American charts, and of what it cost, and proved, along the way. It is a story about a songwriter who believed music belonged to everyone, a brother and sister who believed it so completely they were willing to be laughed at for it, and a choir of actual children whose voices carried the whole unlikely enterprise onto the radio. The Carpenters had fought for sophisticated songs before. “Sing” was the fight for a simple one — and in their catalogue, there is no braver record.

A Song Built for a Street

Sesame Street premiered in November 1969 with a mission that was, for children’s television, close to revolutionary: to use the full seductive machinery of commercial TV — the jingles, the animation, the celebrity faces — to teach the children of American cities their letters and numbers. Music was not decoration on the show; it was the delivery system. And the man who built much of that system was Joe Raposo, the program’s defining composer, a Juilliard-trained musician of Portuguese descent who wrote the show’s rollicking theme and gave Kermit the Frog his wistful anthem “Bein’ Green”. Raposo understood something the education experts around him only theorized: a song aimed at a four-year-old had to be built like a great pop record, because a child’s ear is the least forgiving audience in the world.

“Sing” arrived in 1971, written to accompany film of children at play, and its design is a small masterpiece of benevolent engineering. The melody moves in steps a small voice can follow. The lyric is a series of gentle imperatives — sing a song, sing out loud, sing out strong, sing of good things, not bad. And at its center sits one of the most quietly radical lines in American songwriting: don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear. Just sing. In 1971, on a program built for the children of the inner city, that was not a platitude. It was the whole curriculum in a single sentence — the idea that a child’s voice had value before it had polish, that expression preceded approval. Raposo wrote many beloved songs, but this one condensed his philosophy into three minutes, which is why the show adopted it as something close to a signature: its anthem, its benediction, its closing argument.

The song reached the public first as records from the show itself — a cast performance on The Official Sesame Street 2 Book-and-Record Album in 1971, and live treatments as the Street’s music escaped the studio. Even in that nursery context, it behaved unusually. Most children’s songs are instructions wearing a melody; “Sing” is a philosophy wearing one, and adults kept noticing. That double citizenship — a song a child could master in one hearing and an adult could not exhaust in fifty years — is precisely the quality the Carpenters were trained to hear. But before they could act on it, the song had to survive in the one marketplace more ruthless than the pop charts: the daily judgment of children, for whom it was sung, in rotation, for years. It did not merely survive. It became the show’s defining artifact — the composition most associated with Sesame Street after its own theme, and the one its producers reached for whenever the program needed to say what it was for.

Everybody Sang It First

What happened to “Sing” on Sesame Street itself has no real parallel in television music. It became the most performed song in the program’s history — sung, by one widely repeated count, by more than fifty performers across the decades, and woven into the show’s fabric in English, in Spanish (as “Canta”), and in sign language. The adult cast sang it; Bob McGrath, the show’s genial music teacher figure, made it a specialty; Big Bird sang it; generations of guest stars sang it. In 1975, Lily Tomlin performed it in sign language for deaf children, translating Raposo’s argument into the one medium that proved it beyond reply: the song was never really about the sound of a voice at all. It was about the permission to make one.

The song’s life off the Street began respectably. Barbra Streisand — then, as ever, the most formidable interpreter in American pop — recorded “Sing” in a medley with “Make Your Own Kind of Music” and released it as a single in 1972, taking it onto the easy listening chart, where it reached number twenty-eight. It was a graceful record, and it established an important precedent: the Sesame Street song could survive in adult company. But it remained, in that version, a novelty of repertoire — a great singer’s charming detour. What no one had yet imagined, except for two siblings from Downey, California, was that the song could be a hit — not an album curiosity or a medley half, but a freestanding pop single at the center of a superstar act’s campaign. To see that possibility required ears that had been trained, as Karen and Richard Carpenter’s had been, on the proposition that there is no such thing as a song too simple to be great — only arrangements too lazy to find out.

A Television Special, a Roomful of Children

The Carpenters heard “Sing” for the first time in early 1973, as guests on an ABC television special called Robert Young with the Young, in which the song was performed — Arte Johnson led a chorus of children through it — as part of the show’s celebration of youth. Television specials were the Carpenters’ natural habitat in those years; they were, by then, among the most reliable draws in American entertainment, the act every network wanted when it needed an hour of guaranteed warmth. But what happened in that studio reversed the usual direction of influence. The superstars sat in the guest chairs, heard a children’s song performed by a comedian and a crowd of kids, and recognized, instantly and completely, a hit record.

Their retrospective account of the moment is disarmingly simple: they loved the song, and they knew it would be a hit. The people around them were less sure. By the duo’s own oft-repeated telling, most of their associates thought they were “nuts” for wanting to record it. Consider the risk as their circle would have seen it. The Carpenters in early 1973 were defending the most valuable and most mocked image in pop: wholesome, accomplished, adult. Their albums were now events; A Song for You, released the previous summer, had been received as a work of real sophistication. A Sesame Street song, sung with a children’s choir, threatened to collapse the one distinction their brand depended on — the line between the Carpenters as connoisseurs of the American songbook and the Carpenters as America’s babysitters. The critics who already called them saccharine would not even have to write new jokes. The material wrote them itself.

Fate, meanwhile, had been leaving the song in their path for years, wearing a disguise. In the summer of 1971, Karen and Richard had starred in their own NBC television series — a summer replacement show titled, of all things, Make Your Own Kind of Music, after the pop song of that name. When Barbra Streisand cut “Sing” in 1972, she paired it in a medley with the other half of that very title: “Make Your Own Kind of Music”. The two songs thus arrived in the Carpenters’ story braided together — one as the banner of their first network series, the other as the record their whole circle begged them not to make. There is no evidence the siblings weighed the coincidence for a moment. But as an omen of how thoroughly this little Sesame Street composition had woven itself into the duo’s world before they ever sang it, it could hardly be improved upon.

And yet the instinct was pure Carpenters, in the deepest sense. Richard Carpenter’s whole art was the art of taking a melody seriously — of hearing, inside a song the world had filed under “slight”, the architecture for something enduring. He had done it with a wedding song overheard in a bank commercial, with a Leon Russell rock ballad, with a Bacharach obscurity. “Sing” was the same bet placed on the most unlikely property yet: not a song the world had underrated, but a song the world had correctly rated — as a children’s song — and filed away where serious acts could not touch it. The Carpenters’ wager was that the filing system, not the song, was wrong.

Too Big to Be Told No

It is worth asking why the Carpenters could simply overrule the room. The answer is the least sentimental fact in this story: by 1973, they were too valuable to stop. Herb Alpert had signed the duo to A&M in 1969 after hearing a demo that showcased Karen’s voice, and in the four years since, their records had transformed the label’s fortunes — a run of gold singles and multi-platinum albums that made the brother and sister from Downey the commercial engine of the company Alpert had co-founded. Richard produced the records; the duo increasingly answered, creatively, to no one. The system that might in another era have protected an act from its own eccentricities — a strong-willed producer, a skeptical label chief — had been dismantled by success. When Karen and Richard announced they intended to lead an album campaign with a Sesame Street song, the associates could call it nuts. They could not call it off.

This autonomy is usually told as the Carpenters’ blessing, and on “Sing” it plainly was: the record exists because two artists heard something true in unlikely material and had the power to act on the hearing. But the same unchallengeable position carried the seed of the duo’s later sorrows. The machinery that could not refuse them a children’s song also could not refuse them a schedule — the tours that ground through the mid-1970s long after Karen’s body began filing its objections were booked into the same vacuum of authority. Read against that future, the “Sing” episode becomes the benign face of a dangerous freedom. In 1973 the unstoppable act used its power to make its gentlest record. The industry laughed, the record went to number three, and no one learned the lesson the episode actually taught, which was not about repertoire at all. It was that there was nobody left in the building whose job was to tell the Carpenters no — about anything, ever again.

A Second Verse, Written for Karen

Raposo, approached for permission, did more than grant it: he expanded the song. The Carpenters’ recording carries a second verse that Raposo wrote for them, beginning with an invitation to let the world sing along — and here the story takes one of its most satisfying turns. The Carpenters’ version became so authoritative that Sesame Street itself adopted their form of the song: the added verse, written for the supposed interlopers, entered the show’s own repertoire, occasionally sung by the very cast and Muppets who had originated the number. The children’s program ended up covering the pop stars’ cover of the children’s program’s song. In the annals of the battle for “Sing”, this was the decisive engagement, and it was won without a shot: the song’s own creator ratified the Carpenters’ reading as the standard text.

It is worth understanding why the ratification came so naturally. Raposo’s philosophy and the Carpenters’ practice were the same philosophy in different dialects. He wrote for children as if they were discerning adults; they sang for adults as if adults were still, somewhere inside, children who had been told too often to keep their voices down. Karen Carpenter, especially, was the ideal vessel for the song — a singer whose entire art consisted of making enormous feeling sound simple, of singing to one listener at close range. What reads as naïveté in “Sing” is, in her performance, a discipline: the refusal to decorate, to wink, to apologize. The song says don’t worry that it’s not good enough. Karen sings it like a woman who has decided, professionally and permanently, not to worry.

The Voice in the Basement

There is also the plain matter of register, which nobody in the “nuts” camp seems to have considered. Karen Carpenter’s voice was a true contralto, the rarest instrument in pop, and its riches lived low — in the warm, close frequencies that fans came to call her basement notes, where her tone turned to velvet and her phrasing could suggest an entire emotional weather system without rising above conversational volume. “Sing”, written for untrained young voices, sits exactly in that territory. The melody that a child can sing at a playground is, transposed into the Carpenters’ world, a melody Karen could inhabit at the very center of her gift. Songs the duo made famous often required her to float upward into a sweet head voice; “Sing” let her stay home, in the register where she was least imitable and most herself. What the skeptics heard as a step down in ambition was, for the instrument that mattered, a step into the stronghold.

Around that lead, Richard built the sound that had made the duo unmistakable: the two siblings’ voices, overdubbed again and again until a brother and sister became a choir of themselves, every part tuned with jeweler’s patience. It was among the most labor-intensive signatures in pop — a “natural” sound manufactured by hours of layering — and on “Sing” it performs a quiet thematic miracle. The record’s human architecture is a set of nested choirs: Karen alone at the center; Karen-and-Richard multiplied around her; and at the outside, the actual children of the Jimmy Joyce choir, unlayered and unrepeatable. Innocence frames artifice frames solitude. A listener who knows nothing of the construction still hears its meaning: one voice, deciding to be heard, gathering others as it goes. Raposo wrote a song about the act of singing. The Carpenters, without altering a note of its argument, arranged it into a demonstration of the act itself.

Children in the Studio

The record was made in 1972, in the sessions for the album that became Now & Then, and its personnel list is a compact portrait of the Carpenters’ workshop at its peak. Richard produced and arranged; Ray Gerhardt engineered; Joe Osborn, the great Los Angeles session bassist who anchored hit after hit of the era, played bass; Tom Scott contributed the recorders that give the track its piping, schoolroom color. Karen sang lead and — as on “Please Mr. Postman” and so many others — played the drums, keeping the whole confection on a light, unerring pulse. And around the siblings’ stacked harmonies Richard placed the record’s masterstroke: the Jimmy Joyce Children’s Choir, a professional children’s chorus, singing not as a novelty effect but as full partners in the arrangement.

The decision deserves scrutiny, because it was the riskiest choice in a risky record. A children’s choir could have been a garnish of pure manipulation — the sound of an act reaching, cynically, for the softest available heart. What makes the Carpenters’ “Sing” survive its own concept is that the choir is arranged with the same seriousness as everything else in Richard’s workshop: the children enter as a genuine harmonic body, answering Karen’s lead the way the show’s children answered its cast, and their unpolished brightness throws the burnished perfection of the duo’s harmonies into relief. The record thus contains its own argument. At the center stands the most controlled voice in pop, a woman who worried professionally over every note. Around her sing children who have never worried about a note in their lives. Raposo’s lyric says the second group understands something the first had to learn. The arrangement enacts the lyric. That is not saccharine. That is writing.

Listen, too, to how the record begins — with voices before words, the famous la-la figure passing like sunlight through the track, recorders piping above Karen’s pulse on the drums. It is the sound of a playground remembered from inside a cathedral, and it tells the listener everything about the record’s intentions before a single lyric lands: this will not be a novelty record, and it will not be a compromise. Three minutes and twenty seconds later, nothing about that promise has been broken. In an era when the Carpenters’ records were sometimes criticized as engineered within an inch of their lives, “Sing” shows what the engineering was for — not gloss for its own sake, but the removal of every obstacle between a melody and a listener, until the song moves with the frictionless ease of something that has always existed. The duo had records with greater harmonic daring and records with heavier hearts. They never made one that sounded more inevitable.

The single was released on January 13, 1973, as the debut single from Now & Then — with “Druscilla Penny”, a Carpenter–Bettis song far more in the duo’s melancholy line, tucked on the B-side, as if to reassure the faithful that the melancholists had not been replaced by camp counselors. The marketplace ruled on the argument quickly. The single climbed through the winter and, in the week of April 21, 1973, reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100. On the easy listening chart it went all the way to number one. It became the group’s eighth top-ten pop single and their seventh gold single. The associates who had feared a catastrophe had been wrong in the specific, wonderful way that only hit records can prove people wrong: the children’s song was not a dilution of the Carpenters’ appeal. It was a distillation of it.

Three Minutes Against the Zeitgeist

To feel the full perversity of the choice, set the record back into its season. The spring of 1973 was one of the most self-consciously monumental moments in pop history. Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon arrived in March, all clocks and cash registers, and began its geological residence on the charts. The singer-songwriters were at flood tide, converting private anguish into public literature. Rock aspired, that year, to the condition of the concept album, the confessional, the arena spectacle — to significance, loudly certified. Into this landscape, at the height of their own commercial powers, the Carpenters released a three-minute song from a children’s program, featuring a children’s choir, whose entire lyrical program was an encouragement to make noise happily. It peaked at number three in April, while the monuments were still being uncrated.

The confrontation was not accidental, and it was not naive. Richard Carpenter was a musician of genuine erudition — a student of harmony who idolized the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and the arranger’s art with a scholar’s completeness — and he understood exactly what the zeitgeist valued and exactly what he was declining to give it. The duo’s wager, across Now & Then and its lead single alike, was that craft is its own significance: that a perfectly built small song, sung perfectly, could stand in the same year as the concept albums and outlast most of them. Time has graded the wager generously. The charts of April 1973 are now a museum in which “Sing”, improbably, is among the least dated objects — because it never tried to be of its moment, it cannot be stranded in it. The monuments date. The benediction doesn’t.

The Backlash in a Word: Saccharine

And still, “Sing” cost them. The cost was not commercial — nothing that goes to number three costs anyone money — but critical and historical, and it compounded for years. In the rock press of 1973, already inclined to treat the Carpenters as a guilty pleasure at best, “Sing” functioned as a signed confession. Here, the argument went, was the proof of what the duo had always been: manufacturers of musical treacle, now dispensing with even the pretense of adult material. The word that attached itself to the record, and to them, was saccharine — a word worth examining, because it performs a small sleight of hand. Saccharine is an artificial sweetener: the charge is not merely that the music is sweet, but that its sweetness is fake, synthesized in a laboratory by people who did not feel it. Against Karen Carpenter — a singer whose whole gift was an almost alarming emotional directness, whose phrasing on the sad songs of the era remains the standard against which confessional singing is measured — the charge was not just unkind. It was a misreading so complete it amounts to a critical scandal, and “Sing” was its Exhibit A.

Understand what the critics were actually hearing, and refusing to credit. They were hearing an act refuse the era’s central pose: knowingness. In 1973, the serious end of pop was deep in its singer-songwriter confessional mode and its progressive-rock monument mode; sincerity was required to arrive scarred, ironic, or very loud. The Carpenters offered sincerity in its least defensible packaging — major keys, clean harmonies, a children’s choir — and the gatekeepers of taste reached the conclusion the packaging invited. The tragedy folded inside the comedy is that Karen Carpenter was scarred, in ways the era had no language for and she had no intention of exhibiting; the woman being dismissed as a frosting merchant was carrying more darkness into the studio than most of the confessionalists combined, and transmuting it, record by record, into composure. “Sing” was not her escape from that darkness. It was her doctrine for surviving it, sung in public, with children, at number three. The critics heard a nursery rhyme. The audience — millions of them, including, one suspects, a great many adults who sang along alone in cars — heard the doctrine, and bought it.

Nostalgia, Packaged

The album that carried “Sing” into the world deepened both the triumph and the trap. Now & Then, released on May 1, 1973, was built as a meditation on pop memory: new songs on one side, and on the other a side-long “oldies” medley framed by Richard and John Bettis’s newly written “Yesterday Once More”, in which the duo played disc jockeys to the soundtrack of their own youth. The album reached number two on the Billboard chart that July, sold in the millions, and conquered Japan — where it topped the chart and where Richard, in later years, half-jokingly called it that country’s Sgt. Pepper’s. “Yesterday Once More”, released as the follow-up single, went to number two and became the duo’s biggest worldwide hit. By any commercial measure, the spring and summer of 1973 were the Carpenters’ imperial phase.

But look at the album’s construction with a colder eye, and the battle lines show. Now & Then is an album by twenty-somethings already in the nostalgia business — already framing themselves as custodians of a vanished innocence, their own included. The gatefold presentation steeped the duo in the memorabilia of an idealized American childhood. It was honest, in its way: Richard and Karen genuinely were pop historians, raised on the records the medley celebrates. But as packaging, it locked the image that “Sing” had already threatened to set in amber. The Carpenters were becoming, in the public mind, a heritage act in real time — beloved, monumental, and sealed off from the present tense. Rock culture, busy inventing glam, metal and the singer-songwriter era, was happy to let them keep the past. It would take the rest of Karen’s life, and the decades after her death in 1983, for the culture to come back and admit what had been standing in the heritage wing all along: two of the finest musicians of their generation, making records — “Sing” very much among them — whose craft only grows more visible as the fashions that sneered at them recede.

The medley itself deserves a fairer hearing than posterity usually grants it, because it is the “Sing” argument made at album length. Framed as a golden-age radio broadcast — the duo’s guitarist, Tony Peluso, moonlighting as the disc jockey — side two runs “Yesterday Once More” into a chain of early-sixties treasures: “Fun, Fun, Fun”, “The End of the World”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”, “Dead Man’s Curve”, “Johnny Angel”, “One Fine Day”. Critics of the day filed the whole enterprise under escapism, and escapism is exactly what it announced itself as. But listen to what the two twenty-somethings were actually doing: constructing, in public, a theory of pop history in which the girl groups and surf bands and Brill Building miniatures of their childhood were classics — worthy of the reverence the culture reserved for its albums and auteurs. In 1973 that theory was eccentric. A decade later it was the premise of the oldies industry, the reissue business and eventually the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Carpenters were not behind their times on Now & Then. On the matter of what the past was worth, they were so far ahead of them that the lead looked, to their contemporaries, like retreat.

Kyoto, en Español, in Silence

The song, meanwhile, was traveling — and its itinerary is the happiest in the Carpenters’ catalogue. On tour, the duo made a ritual of it: rather than carry a children’s choir around the world, they invited local children’s choirs to join them on stage, so that “Sing” became, city by city, a collaboration with whatever community they were standing in — the song’s philosophy enacted as stagecraft. The practice survives most beautifully on record from Japan. Touring there in 1974, the Carpenters recorded their first live album in Osaka, released the following year as Live in Japan, and its version of “Sing” features the Kyoto Children’s Choir carrying the children’s parts — in the country where the duo’s following bordered on devotion, and where the song settled into a permanent place in the culture.

Its other journeys crossed languages and senses. The Carpenters’ version eventually appeared in bilingual form, moving between English and Spanish — the 1991 box set From the Top preserves a bilingual performance — closing a circle the song had begun on Sesame Street itself, where “Sing” had long been sung as “Canta.” In 1994, engineer Roger Young built a new recording and remix of their version for the anniversary collection Interpretations, as if the catalogue itself kept returning to the song for maintenance. And all the while, back on the Street, the song kept accumulating the strangest and most distinguished performance history in children’s television — dozens of singers, puppets and guests, performances in Spanish and in sign language, the whole enterprise still radiating from Raposo’s three minutes. The pop hit of 1973 had not diminished the song’s original mission. It had exported it.

The Japanese chapter, in particular, grew into something like a second career for the song. The Live in Japan album was considered important enough to be issued as a Japan-only release in 1975 — a striking gesture of respect toward a single market — and the Kyoto choir performance fixed “Sing” in Japanese affections permanently. The Carpenters were always playing, in Japan, to an audience that had never received the memo about their uncoolness; the hierarchies of American rock criticism simply did not apply, and the duo’s craft could be heard there at face value. It is one of the quiet satisfactions of the “Sing” story that the song found its most unconflicted home among listeners who encountered it exactly as Raposo and the Carpenters both intended: as a beautiful piece of work, sung beautifully, about the worth of an unembarrassed voice.

Why It Endures

Every element of the case against “Sing” has, with time, reversed into the case for it. It was called a children’s song; it turned out to be a standard, sturdy enough to live in a television institution, a Streisand medley, a Kyoto concert hall and the repertoire of school choirs on several continents. It was called a commercial calculation; it was, by the testimony of everyone close to the decision, the opposite — a record the professionals around the act begged them not to make. It was called saccharine; listen to it now, knowing what the years after 1973 held for the woman singing it, and the composure at its center sounds less like sweetness than like courage wearing its kindest face. Karen Carpenter spent her career being told, in the language of the marketplace, exactly what Raposo’s lyric warns against: that the voice had to be worried over, packaged, made good enough for everyone else to hear. “Sing” was her public refusal of the premise, delivered with a straight face, a children’s choir, and a melody a four-year-old could carry.

That is why the song endures, and why its battle was worth fighting. Pop music mostly rewards the armored — the ironic, the knowing, the cool. “Sing” rewards the opposite, and lets its singer be vindicated by the simplest possible evidence: half a century on, people still sing it, in classrooms and concert halls and kitchens, in English and Spanish and silence, without embarrassment, exactly as instructed. Joe Raposo wrote the doctrine. The Muppets tested it. And Karen Carpenter, standing at the most exposed point of her career with every critic in America waiting to call her nuts, proved it could top the charts. Don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear. She never did. Just sing.

Joe Raposo did not live to collect the full vindication. He died in 1989, at just fifty-one, leaving behind the Sesame Street theme, “Bein’ Green”, and a body of work that had quietly taught two generations of Americans how songs work. But it is “Sing” that became his monument — the composition that escaped its original street and now belongs to the common repertoire, sung at school assemblies and choir concerts and family gatherings by people who could not name its author and would not need to. That anonymity would not have troubled him. Raposo’s whole career was an argument that the worth of a song lies in the singing of it, not the signing of it. The Carpenters understood the argument because they had built their own careers inside it: two perfectionists in service of other people’s melodies, fighting to be taken seriously for the way they carried songs rather than the fact that they hadn’t written them. On “Sing”, the carriers and the composer met on perfectly common ground, and the meeting produced the gentlest hit of 1973 — and the one that has traveled farthest from home.

The vindication, when it finally came for the duo generally, arrived from the unlikeliest direction — the very alternative culture whose grandparents had filed them under treacle. In 1990, Sonic Youth, then the ruling band of American underground rock, devoted a track of their album Goo to Karen: “Tunic (Song for Karen)”, an act of identification across every supposed divide. Four years later came If I Were a Carpenter, an entire tribute album on which the alternative generation — Sonic Youth, Sheryl Crow, Matthew Sweet, the Cranberries and a dozen others — took the duo’s catalogue apart with unmistakable reverence. The critics’ case had collapsed entirely; what remained standing was the music, and the realization that Karen Carpenter’s composure had never been the opposite of depth. “Sing” sits near the center of that realization. It is the record where the duo’s supposed limitation — their inability to be embarrassed by sincerity — is revealed, in retrospect, as their defining courage. The associates were wrong in 1973, the gatekeepers were wrong for decades, and the children, who were never consulted and never in doubt, were right all along.