The Carpenters

The Carpenters were Karen and Richard Carpenter, a brother and sister from Downey, California, who signed with A&M Records in 1969 and spent the next year turning "(They Long to Be) Close to You" and "We've Only Just Begun" into huge hits. In a decade of fuzzboxes and stack amps they went the other way entirely: Richard at the piano, writing, arranging and stacking the harmonies like cut glass, and Karen, who had started out behind the drum kit, singing in a low, unhurried contralto that could make a greeting-card sentiment sound like a secret.

They'd been at it longer than the overnight story suggests. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, the pair had played together since 1965, first in a jazz-leaning trio with Wesley Jacobs and then in a middle-of-the-road band called Spectrum. Once the hits started they barely stopped, piling up Top 40 and adult contemporary smashes, a Best New Artist Grammy and a place among the top sellers in soft rock and easy listening.

The endless touring wore them thin. Richard took 1979 off after becoming addicted to Quaaludes, and Karen was battling anorexia nervosa; it ended in 1983 when she died of heart failure caused by complications of the illness, a death that pushed eating disorders into the open. The records never went away, and sales have long since passed 100 million.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.