Carole King: a natural talent
Singer-songwriter behind dozens of hits, watershed album Tapestry to be honoured
In the winter of 1971, at the A&M studios off Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Carole King, who had long viewed herself as primarily a tunesmith and “always enjoyed being a sideman,” set up shop in Studio B.
Producer Lou Adler knew precisely what he wanted from King, with help from her friends James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.
“Make it simple,” he recalls 44 years later. “Tie her to the piano. Make it sound like she’s playing just for me. Accessible, vulnerable, personal.”
Tapestry took three weeks to record and soon, Adler says, “became the soundtrack to people’s lives.”
The album sold more than 25 million units. It cruised the charts for more than 300 weeks, perched at No. 1 for 15. Tapestry collected four Grammys, including best record, album and song of the year.
Tapestry was a watershed, yet King, who will be celebrated at the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, had long before conquered the music industry.
King, now 73, strolls barely noticed into the tony Sun Valley Lodge in Sun Valley, Idaho. Deeply private and guarded, King didn’t want to be interviewed at her home. In fact, she didn’t want to be interviewed at all.
Gracious but removed, she will share, but only up to a point. She prefers you know her through her songs. And what songs. In the 1960s, King and her first husband, Gerry Goffin, were a factory, producing more than 100 hits recorded by almost everyone: The Shirelles (Will You Love Me Tomorrow), The Beatles (Chains), The Animals (Don’t Bring Me Down), Little Eva (The Loco-Motion), The Drifters (Up on the Roof ), Aretha Franklin (You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman) and many more.
“I sing or play piano every day,” King says of her musical regimen. “I’m not trying to write a song, or do anything for public consumption.”
But songwriting, she emphatically answers, is over. King had topselling albums after Tapestry, but the extraordinary run of hits ended decades ago.
King married Goffin at 17 but divorced young, becoming a single mother of two by her mid-20s. She thought she couldn’t write lyrics — that was Goffin’s gig.
But turns out she could write lyrics. More than half of Tapestry’s dozen tracks are hers alone, including You’ve Got a Friend, So Far Away and I Feel the Earth Move.
And she shared, giving James Taylor You’ve Got a Friend, which he released before her version. “A remarkably generous thing to do,” Taylor says. The song became a monster hit for him, one of his signatures.