Twenty-five years ago this month in November 1982, by way of People magazine, was the first public acknowledgment that singer Karen Carpenter was in Lenox Hill Hospital battling the effects of anorexia nervosa. Under normal circumstances, this event would merely be remembered as a chapter in the turbulent career of the Carpenters, a California-based brother-and-sister pop duo whose work dominated the charts of the Nixon era and whose personal lives were as tormented as their public personae were squeaky-clean — fodder for VH-1’s Behind the Music. However, reflecting on the initial shock of the announcement of such news 25 years on, what makes this a painful observance is that Karen didn’t come back to us — just 34 days into 1983, with a seemingly encouraging appearance at the Grammy Awards in between, Karen Carpenter was dead.

Despite their enormous fan base, easily confirmed by the most cursory of web searches, the Carpenters have never enjoyed much popularity among music critics. It is as easy for a music critic to find fault with the Carpenters’ basic sound as it would be for the same critic to run out of superlatives in describing Ray Charles; the Carpenters are low-key, melancholic and inextricably tied to their time and place. The flawless soft-rock textures they employed to perfection was their trademark; Richard Carpenter and David Gates more or less pioneered the ’70s soft-rock sound after examples provided by the Beach Boys, Phil Spector and the Beatles in the late ’60s. While the soft-rock sound burned up AM radio before disco hit the airwaves, in the critics’ pantheon the FM fare defines the early ’70s — Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and the Allman Brothers among others.

This point of view seems like a quest for the dark side in an era of light. Yet the Carpenters created some of the darkest music of their era, not a comic-book darkness of eldritch warlocks and witchfinders as in Black Sabbath or in the reinvented blues jams of Led Zep or the Allmans, but a very human, deeply painful darkness of alienation and loneliness.

“Day after day
I must face a world of strangers
Where I don’t belong…”
– The Carpenters’ “I Won’t Last a Day Without You”

The slick, fussy production work on the Carpenters’ songs, considered a necessary part of the landscape in their time, has helped to date them, though that sound is still very much with us — ask anyone who has watched American Idol what a pop ballad sounds like. Even this writer is not particularly fond of the heavy-metal rock guitar leads found in certain Carpenters’ pieces of the mid-’70s, a particularly noisome one lands right in the middle of one of their most profound creations, “Goodbye to Love.” However, there is lot to be said for mentally “tuning out” elements that no longer appeal in order to tune in THAT voice — there is no more exquisite voice in the pop music of the 1970s, a human, almost matronly but fresh, eternally yearning voice that can melt the hardest of hearts. When the backgrounds work, they work very well, the coldness of the surroundings increasing the sense of loneliness and isolation in Karen’s voice, as in “Superstar” (sample) — a wisp of oboe over distant strings; perfect.

The Carpenters made 14 albums, and there are countless reissues and repackages of this material; it can be confusing to know where to start. Personally and completely unscientifically, it seems a good place to begin is the 1997 collection Love Songs as their love songs is the material that Karen put herself into the most. It is all the more poignant when you realize that Karen Carpenter sang of an idealized “love,” without really experiencing it in her personal life to any great degree; she was too busy playing concert dates, recording and being a “Superstar” herself to pursue meaningful relationships — or even to have what many of us call “a life.” Karen Carpenter wrote almost none of the lyrics that she sang, and yet she sang these songs as though she owned them and that they represented her personal point of view. Karen could make a line like “Baby baby baby baby oh baby” sound like something significant was going on, and something was — a complex family life and professional situation combined with an intense personal misery, feelings of inadequacy and finally, anorexia — elements of which, among others, ultimately contributed to her death at age 32.

Had she survived, Karen Carpenter would probably have happily pulled out of the music business altogether after her recovery. Were she alive today, she would be 57 years old, possibly a proud parent of college-age children, perhaps involved in the kind of charitable work that continues to drive her surviving brother Richard Carpenter, who remains very private and out of the public eye. No matter if she had never sang another note after “Now,” her last recording made in early 1982, the world would be a little less sad a place to live in if we knew that Karen Carpenter were out there, somewhere, rather than with the angels she sang about in her songs.

“On the day that you were born
The angels got together and
Decided to create a dream come true…”
– The Carpenters’ “Close to You”