The Carpenters’ Classic That Highlighted Karen’s Way With a Sad Song

Some singers can put across a sad song by emoting and making you feel the effort they put into wringing the sorrow from every note. And then there are a precious few who can deliver the gut punch without deviating from their typical tone.

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For sure, Karen Carpenter belonged in the latter category. And when she got hold of a naturally sad song like “Rainy Days And Mondays”, a major hit by The Carpenters in 1971, the effect could be somehow subtle and overwhelming all at once.

An Unstoppable Formula

By 1971, The Carpenters had established themselves as soft-rock superstars. Siblings Richard and Karen had honed in on an unmistakable formula. And they reeled off as impressive a run of hit singles as anyone else could manage in that era.

You could point to many reasons for their wondrous success. Their records were impeccably recorded, in large part by expert Wrecking Crew studio musicians. Richard’s arrangements consistently sounded fantastic popping out of AM speakers.

But it generally boiled down to Karen’s vocal performances. She rarely did anything more than sing the notes as presented to her, without embellishment or improvisation. But her voice possessed an unmistakable quality that could make listeners shiver. That quality certainly came to the fore on “Rainy Days And Mondays”.

Reuniting with Songwriters

Roger Nichols and Paul Williams wrote “Rainy Days And Mondays”. The songwriting pair (Nichols wrote the music and Williams the lyrics) were on a hot streak by the time they penned this classic. Their previous successes included “We’ve Only Just Begun”, which The Carpenters turned into a No. 2 hit.

Oddly enough, “Rainy Days And Mondays” nearly eluded the duo. It was first pitched to The Fifth Dimension, who passed on it. Luckily, it found its way into a batch of demos sampled by Richard Carpenter as he was looking for vehicles for the group’s 1971 album Carpenters.

Williams took inspiration for the lyrics in part from something his mother used to say about “feeling old.” “Rainy Days And Mondays” continued the hot streak for both the recording duo and the songwriting pair, as it also perched at No. 2. Carole King’s double A-sided single “It’s Too Late”/”I Feel The Earth Move” kept it out of the top spot.

Behind the Lyrics of “Rainy Days And Mondays”

“Rainy Days And Mondays” details the indefinable malaise that we all seem to experience at one time or another. “What I’ve got they used to call the blues,” Carpenter sings, suggesting that the term had fallen out of fashion. “Nothing is really wrong,” she shrugs. “Feelin’ like I don’t belong.”

“Some kind of lonely clown” is how she describes herself when she gets in those moods. Instinctively, she goes to the person who can pull her out of this funk. “Funny, but it seems I always wind up here with you,” she muses. “Nice to know somebody loves me.”

The refrain of “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down” has gone beyond just a song lyric to become an idiom of its own. That speaks to the expertise of Paul Williams as a writer. And, of course, it helped that the inimitable Karen Carpenter was the first one to utter that line.

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