“But they’re back again, just like a long lost friend/all the songs I love so well” is how the run-up to the chorus goes, just as the session guitarist tosses in the first of his tastefully placed soft-rock licks, and then the floor drops out from under us. The lead vocal, which had been prominent in both channels, drops back two audible notches, allowing the backing vocals (Richard and a double-tracked Karen in the left channel, and Karen harmonizing with herself several times over in the right) not just to come in, but to completely take over. The chorus, as if you weren’t already singing it, is “Every sha-la-la-la, every whoa-oh-whoa still shines,” which is patently awful, but nobody cares, because that’s when the string section comes in with a rising-then-falling variation of the melody. “Every shing-a-ling-a-ling that they’re starting to sing so fine” is the rhyme line, if you can stand it, which you can’t, but what we really mean by “you can’t stand it” is “there is no way of stopping it,” which is true both in the literal sense and the emotional: it’s here where the recording lets you know that if it can’t win you over with the song itself, then it is not above resorting to sheer volume. The strings stop echoing phrases and beginning forming a bedrock underneath the bass just as we enter the chorus’s middle: “When they get to the part where he’s breakin’ her heart, it can really make me cry just like before.” A slide guitar drizzles something high and melancholy over the pause before the punch line while all nonessential instrumentation drops quietly out. “It’s yesterday once more” is what Karen Carpenter sings by way of preparing you for what the backing vocal track is about to do, which is to sing “shoobie-do-lang-lang” twice as the song eases its way irreversibly toward the second verse.