Who does music belong to, after all? In the latest books from UT Press’s Music Matters series, Karen Tongson and Fred Goodman seek answers—in their own ways—to this delicate question.

In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson relates several personal connections she shares with Karen Carpenter: for one, she was named after the late singer, whom Tongson’s mother was often compared to in her own singing career. Growing up in the Philippines, Tongson heard the Carpenters on every radio station and karaoke machine, where the band is still played with as much or more frequency than they enjoyed in the 70s. Several Filipino singers have been dubbed “The Next Karen Carpenter” with riveting covers of the band amassing millions of views on YouTube. And, perhaps coincidentally, but no less significant, both Karens moved to Southern California in pursuit of a version of the American dream.

Tongson concedes that her differences with Karen Carpenter may outweigh the connections, given that Tongson does not fit the projection of white normalcy that haunted the Carpenters throughout their career, as a queer Filipino woman who never fit into the white, heteronormative values of her Southern Californian neighborhood.

Yet this is precisely where Tongson draws the more challenging, rewarding connections to Carpenter. Although the band seems representative of “whiteness and promises” (as an ill-transcribed karaoke machine once misquoted “We’ve Only Just Begun”), Tongson reinterprets the Carpenters as inherently queer, least of all in their gender noncomfority and all the more in their subversion of the very normalcy ascribed to them—and that they perhaps aspired to.

Tongson suspects that critics who dismissed the band for their aesthetic of “normal” wanted the ordinary life The Carpenters were not afraid to project. While “everybody was dying to not be from the suburbs,” as John Bettis—Richard Carpenter’s songwriting partner—stated, the Carpenters were dying to be in the suburbs. While artists and listeners of the time were flocking to rebellious, restless musical landscapes indicative of the times, the Carpenters were kickstarting soft rock.

The Carpenters were thus queerest in “their exacting normalcy and polished exemplarity,” embracing what other people “aren’t even consciously aware they desire most.” Since nobody else would admit to wanting such ordinary lives, the Carpenters—and Tongson—were relegated to the category of “corny,” out of place and time with their contemporaries.

But this aspiration to normalcy, “like a wishful incantation meant to bring something into being through its mere utterance,” and however covertly wished for, is a distinctly American wish for a security that eludes its suitors. Tongson’s move from the Philippines to California proved immediately harrowing, as her mother and grandmother’s “light-skinned middle-classness” in the Philippines did not translate to Riverside, and other children asked Karen if they “ate people” in her country.

Both families sought an “anxious perfectionism” because they were keenly aware of the stakes, and Tongson argues that this is precisely what is queer about the Carpenters, an “aberrant normalcy” that “might resonate with others who might also feel fearful of making mistakes in such a master-planned scenario, others for whom one wrong move could undo everything so carefully wrought, so hard won.” In Tongson’s case, the Carpenters resonated so deeply with her because she understood that “these fantasies of suburban tranquility would always evade me,” and the Carpenters, however much they grasped at these fantasies, confirmed that anxiety.

In their narrative pursuit of normalcy the Carpenters’ appearance belied an illusory goal, the idea that their middle-class white lives were normal (and therefore perfect) betrayed by the family’s gendered expectations of family and Karen’s own struggles with anorexia nervosa. The most obvious tragedy of Karen Carpenter’s story is her untimely death at 32, and Tongson laments this as well as the larger story of Karen’s life. Although she was the star of the Carpenters, at home Karen was expected to support her brother and bandmate Richard’s dreams. As revealed in a magazine mistaking Karen’s title of “lead singer” as “lead sister,” Tongson notes the “pointed and painful truth” that Karen was “the lead, the star, yet she was defined, both in public and in private, by her relationship to her brother.” Indeed, in an earlier iteration of their band, they were known as The Richard Carpenter Trio.

Just as Karen reclaimed the irony of “lead sister” in a t-shirt she wore in performances (and which her largest fan organization is named), Tongson here argues for Karen Carpenter’s significance apart from Richard, perhaps for the first time. In Tongson’s pressing book, Karen does not belong to Richard or her parents or white middle-class suburbia, but to Filipino and queer bodies giving new life to Karen’s voice. Tongson’s contribution offers a way forward for personal writing in music criticism, asking who music belongs to and suggesting that certain appropriations can be quite liberative.

If Fred Goodman’s Why Lhasa de Sela Matters read more as a biography of the late singer than a critical approach, one cannot fault him for the lack of material on the American singer who was beloved everywhere except her home country. Introduced to her music in 2010, one year after her death at 37, Goodman wondered, “How could I have not heard of her? How could any artist capable of this die quiet and unknown?”

Lhasa de Sela remains relatively unknown in the United States because, as Goodman notes, roughly half of her songs were not in English, “a deal-breaker in a country where most of us aren’t used to being asked to step outside the familiar walls of our Anglophone mass culture.” She sang her entire first album, La Llorana, in Spanish, and her second album, The Living Road, in an even split between Spanish, French, and English (each language has four songs interwoven throughout the album). On her final album, Lhasa, she sang entirely in English, partially in a bid to gain traction in the States.

As evident in her multilingual approach to music, Lhasa belonged to the world, a testament to her family, who moved between New York and Mexico several times in her childhood as part of their bohemian lifestyle. Lhasa developed her artistry in Montreal, and she enjoyed the most success in Europe, where BBC named her 2005’s Best Artist of the Americas and the London Times called The Living Road one of the ten best world music albums of the decade.

At home, however, the reception to Lhasa remained cool throughout her short career and life, where cultural values made it difficult (and still do, to an extent) for a Spanish-language artist to find an audience. Thus, Goodman offers his biographical sketch of Lhasa as a corrective, given that “her consciousness was wholly American—daring and iconoclastic for sure, extraordinarily far-reaching and humanistic, but still homegrown.”

Goodman’s account relies heavily on interviews he conducted with Lhasa’s family, friends, and musical collaborators, and to give each of them as much space as he does is welcome, illuminating Lhasa through the primary legacy she left for her loved ones. The argument that Goodman sets out to make—that Lhasa is worth remembering—is proven time and again by the stories her intimates tell to memorialize her.

Both Lhasa’s lyrics and life story attest to her as a student of philosophical wondering, as her father Alejandro recounts that she “confused fairy tales with her own circumstances growing up and in that light saw things imbued with a kind of magic and mystery and wonder.” Both her father and mother, Alexandra, instilled in their five daughters a sense of creativity and search for meaning as the most significant aspect of life.

This “constant self-searching,” as her sister Miriam describes it, is evident in Lhasa’s restless artistic spirit, as she learned and performed traditional songs from at least twelve countries, would often hire musicians without an audition (preferring to have a conversation with them to see if she could spend a lot of time with them on the road), and even took a seven year break between her first and second albums because, in her words, “I have to live. I can’t write until I live it.”

Lhasa’s story is an American story, not least of which because she decided to be a singer when, as a kid, she saw a documentary on Billie Holiday and said, “I’m going to do that.” Like Karen Carpenter, Lhasa de Sela and her family pursued an American vision of success, even if Lhasa’s story was more invested in the pursuit of personal fulfillment than of normalcy. When Lhasa was diagnosed with cancer, Goodman imagines she felt betrayed after giving herself to the celebration and exploration of life, only to have it taken from her. In the final comments of Lhasa’s family and closest confidants, their grief makes it feel as if Lhasa left the world yesterday and not ten years ago. Perhaps in this way Lhasa’s lasting impact is not at all lost but is only waiting to be embraced by a larger audience.

Goodman notes that Lhasa’s expression of an “apprehension and conveyance of the inexpressible” is best achieved through her song “Soon This Space Will Be Too Small.” In it, Lhasa warns the listener that she cannot be held to the limited walls she has been contained within to this point. “I’ll put my foot on the living road,” she sings, “and be carried from here / to the heart of the world.”

An aspirational sentiment, sure, but one accessible—however momentarily—to any listener who has been transported by music to a deeper place of living and being. In both Goodman and Tongson’s contributions to the Music Matters series, one feels that both Karen Carpenter and Lhasa de Sela will continue carrying their audiences from here to the heart of the world, sharing horizons that are still new to us.