Passage

Passage is the eighth studio album by the American music duo The Carpenters. Released in 1977, it produced the hit singles "All You Get from Love Is a Love Song", "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" and "Sweet, Sweet Smile". The Carpenters' "Sweet, Sweet Smile" (written by Robert Otha Young and Juice Newton) was picked up by Country radio and put the duo in the top ten of Billboard'''s Country chart in the spring of 1978. This album was a considerable departure for the siblings and contained experimental material such as the Klaatu cover "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" single—which reached no. 32 in the US but was a top ten hit in much of the world (and prompted numerous letters to the Carpenters asking when World Contact Day was scheduled). Coincidentally, the album's release predated Steven Spielberg's similarly themed film Close Encounters of the Third Kind by two months. Nonetheless, the album was the group's first to fall short of gold certification in the US. This is the only Carpenters album (aside from their Christmas albums) not to contain a Richard Carpenter or John Bettis song and also the second album to not have Karen playing drums at all. It was the first studio album since Close to You not to use the familiar Carpenters logo on the front cover, although a small version of the logo appears on the back cover. Background and recording Prior to the album's recording, a search was made for a new Carpenters producer, prompted by the band's decreasing popularity and Richard Carpenter's struggle with production duties (caused by his addiction to sleeping pills). However, according to Richard Carpenter, "not one major producer would sign on; radio was not quite as friendly at that time to our type of sound and to be honest, my track record on the whole was a tough act to follow. Accordingly, I remained producer, but I did try to approach this new project from a different angle, hence my selection of songs for this album made Passage a bit of a departure from our previous recordings."