Legendary songwriter Carole King reflects on the life that lead to her immortal songs
In the songwriters’ pantheon, few can hold a candle to Carole King. By the time she was 25, she’d co-written such pop classics as the Shirelles Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Aretha Franklin’s ( You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman and Little Eva’s The Loco-Motion.
Before she was 30, she’d released her 1971 solo album Tapestry (there’ve been 24 others), which sold more than 25 million copies and won four Grammys, becoming the soundtrack to a generation’s lives. Last summer, she performed it in full to a rapturous Hyde Park, yelling exultantly as she strapped on an electric guitar: “This is what 74 looks like.”
It was a rare moment in the spotlight for one of pop’s most retiring icons. King’s no oddball recluse, simply a musical genius with little interest in fame. It’s an attitude encapsulated in Beautiful, the Olivier-award winning musical about her early life, when her character declines to perform, asking: “Who wants to hear a normal person sing?”
“Normal? That’s me, yes!” King smiles. “The music business is very demanding and I cannot live like that, I need other things, I need a life around which this gift and this work I do flows.
“Gerry (Goffin, her first husband and songwriting partner) was always the spearhead: ‘Come on, we need to write the next record for the Shirelles!’” she continues. “I was driven too, but not to the level many people are in the business. I still feel that way. My life isn’t about touring, it isn’t about all the things so many of my peers do. My life is about having one.”
King’s in London and giving a rare interview to mark Beautiful’s second anniversary in the West End; later that day, she appears on stage beside a delighted cast. The show, which began on Broadway in 2014, starts with King as a 15-year-old New-York schoolgirl selling songs to publishing companies (“I was fearless,” she cries), then marrying Goffin, after becoming pregnant at just 17.
Professionally, the duo were unstoppable, producing hits like Up On The Roof for the Drifters, One Fine Day for The Chiffons and Pleasant Valley Sunday for the Monkees, but domestically, things were stormy. Goffin wanted to be out schmoozing contacts and experiencing the emerging 1960’s counterculture
Often I think of young Carole as ‘her’ not me, but it is my life, I am the Carole you see on stage. The emotional beats are all true.” Carole King