I know some people often deride the Carpenters and their supposed "treacly" hits, but I always thought Karen Carpenter had one of the greatest pure voices in pop music. Now a new book by her brother looks back not at the sad way she died, but at their life's work together, tracing every smash they had on the charts and what helped those songs make a breakthrough.

"He cites some unexpected influences, including another man-and-woman duo, Les Paul and Mary Ford, whose early experimenting with vocal overdubs and layered harmonies electrified him.

“It made a profound impression on me, that ooh-ah, ooh-ah. I was maybe 5 or 6,” Carpenter said. “I had no idea how all this was done. I just knew it was different and that I really liked it. And many years later, of course, it came up in my mind while I was arranging a lot of things that I wrote the harmonies for.”

"...Carpenter’s ear for finding hits, often in unlikely places, was as essential as his ear for making them.

"He found “Superstar,” the Carpenters song probably most beloved of younger generations, when he heard Bette Midler sing it on “The Tonight Show.” He came across “We’ve Only Just Begun” in a bank commercial before they made it a hit.

"When he heard them, he knew just what to do with them."

Book gets close to the music that made Carpenters superstars