‘It shook me to my core’: 50 years of Carole King’s Tapestry

James Taylor

The singer-songwriter style was named round 1970, give or take, and was stated to apply to me and, amongst others Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens and Jackson Browne. Why that supposed motion didn’t start with Bob Dylan and even Woody Guthrie or Robert Johnson beats me – perhaps they had been nonetheless “folk”. But, if it means something, Carole King deserves to be thought of as its epitome. I’d been deep into her songs – Up on the Roof, Natural Woman, Crying within the Rain – for a decade earlier than Danny Kortchmar launched us in Los Angeles in 1970. She performed piano on my Sweet Baby James album whereas engaged on the songs for her personal Tapestry. Our collaboration, our prolonged musical dialog over the subsequent three or 4 years was actually one thing great. I’ve stated it earlier than, however Carole and I discovered we spoke the identical language. Not simply that we had been each musicians however as if we shared a typical ear, a parallel musical/emotional path. And we introduced this out in each other, I consider.

It was an enormous change for Carole to depart New York for LA. She left behind a longtime, vastly profitable profession as a Brill Building [era] tunesmith, along with her husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, and went west, on her personal, with two younger daughters. She began writing by herself, about herself – that’s to say, from her personal life. It got here out of her so sturdy, so fierce and contemporary. So clearly in her personal voice. And but, so instantly accessible, so acquainted: you knew these songs already. I had that have the primary time I heard Carole sing You’ve Got a Friend from the stage of the Troubadour: “Oh yeah, that one.” Incredible that this track didn’t at all times exist. Carole’s focus was her household: [children] Louise and Sherry, and imminently, Levi and Molly. She had no time for the stuff the rest of us in Laurel Canyon had been up to. She had her household and her songs. Certainly she would have her adventures, dramatic emotional switchbacks, in years to come. But in these days, she appeared to watch the dancers with a sort, wry detachment. To me, she was a port within the storm, a superb and severe individual with an astonishing reward, and, of course, a pal.

Roberta Flack

I first heard the Shirelles’ model of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow after I was working as a college instructor in Washington DC. The track caught with me – I included it in my repertoire at [pub] Mr Henry’s on Capitol Hill and later recorded it for my album Quiet Fire. It was for me a time of deep introspection and this track expressed a vulnerability that every of us experiences within the course of discovering and embracing love. Donny [Hathaway] and I liked the songs on Tapestry and labored out our association of You’ve Got a Friend in a approach that expressed how we felt about what it means to assist one another by the very best and the worst of occasions. My pal and fellow Aquarian Carole King has formed our musical panorama with the songs that she wrote that contact every of us in such deeply private methods.

Tori Amos

In 1971, a cool teenage babysitter put the brand new album Tapestry on the stereo, and, at seven years previous, my thoughts was blown. It was virtually as if Mother Earth herself was singing to us. There was a readability to the storytelling, whether or not the songs had us dancing with them or haunting us as we sat cross-legged on the worn Methodist rug. And after we had laughed and cried through the enjoying of the album, we had been each very positive that in Carole King we had each discovered a brand new pal for all times.

MC Taylor, Hiss Golden Messenger

They don’t make data like Carole King’s Tapestry any extra. They can’t, as a result of I don’t suppose the individuals who would possibly try to achieve this have ever completely reckoned with the sort of magic she was engaged on that album. Consequently, the kinds of data that Tapestry made it potential to make and promote in massive numbers – data which are susceptible, confessional, sung and performed by the one who wrote the songs and “classic” in sound and sentiment – typically really feel emotionally supercharged, the place Tapestry feels plain-spoken and straightforward. As somebody who makes music that shares a minimum of some sort of DNA with King’s iconic album, I can attest that making a report as compelling as Tapestry requires the mastery of a language that Carole King invented. It’s kind of a musical Rosetta stone, and an enormous testomony to what an unbelievable interpreter of the human expertise she was, and continues to be.

Rickie Lee Jones

I first heard of Carole King after I was about 16. James Taylor introduced her to the eye of the broader world when he requested her to open for him in 1971. But the reality is I had been listening to her most of my life, by the voices of the numerous ladies and men who recorded her music.

Up on the Roof, recorded by the Drifters, by no means grew previous on my report participant. I didn’t have to dwell within the metropolis to perceive how a lot it meant to have a spot to name your individual, to really feel how exhausting life is after working all day and searching up on the stars and discovering a smile in your coronary heart. Carole and Gerry delivered a Valentine that day, one the entire world opened 12 months after 12 months. The sum of the track was higher than the phrases themselves: “Hustling crowd”, “tired and beat”, “right smack dab” – phrases that would turn out to be dated, however by no means did as a result of the sentiment was so sort. Somewhere in there are the seeds that blow all the best way to New Jersey, and plant themselves into young Bruce Springsteen who, like me and Chuck E and Junior Lee, invited Wendy, Kitty, and all of the others Up on the Roof. It was the most secure place a child standing within the shadow of metropolis life may discover, on prime of the world listening to the celebrities.

Folk rock had lengthy dominated the FM airwaves when music started to make a transfer again to the basics of songwriting: the three-minute track, the refrain sung thrice, the bridge – an endangered passage from one finish of the track to the opposite. I used to be completely satisfied to hear songs once more coming from Cat Stevens, James Taylor and Carole King. She wrote from a style she had been half of creating, the rock’n’roll of soul.

Tapestry was a very powerful report of its time. I gained’t qualify it by saying feminine, songwriter or any of that. It signalled the nation and the folks’s need to have a easy and exquisite track to sing. With Carole King, issues of character and the adoration of the star are put aside. She is first a working girl. Her hit You’ve Got a Friend was written for Gerry, who had psychological sickness, to let him know that though she might not be by his aspect, she was at all times on his aspect. I do know nothing in regards to the two of them besides this: they wrote nice songs, and the tradition that I name mine is formed partially by the music they wrote whereas Carole was nonetheless only a child.

Tapestry’s success roots us to our musical historical past. It overcame no matter present pattern would render it passé and continues to promote 12 months after 12 months. That girl on the duvet of Tapestry evoked a peaceful and peaceable soul. I used to simply sit and stare at it. She seemed like an informed girl who took care of her life. Fifty years later, Tapestry stays undaunted and timeless as it’s mirrored within the voices of girls who uncover the songs as in the event that they had been simply written final 12 months. Easy sufficient to keep in mind, haunting sufficient to need to keep in mind, that’s the mark of an awesome track – and nice songwriter.

Randy Newman

I believe you could possibly make a fairly good case that Carole King and Gerry Goffin had been the very best common songwriters of the final half of the twentieth century. I really like Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. Everything she sings is deeply felt.

Sharon Van Etten

Tapestry was one of the primary data my mom and I bonded over. It was so significant to sing in unison with my mother to a guttural, sincere account carried out by a stranger to whom I felt so inexplicably linked: a pal, a sister, a mom, and any person’s daughter, a low voice and an angle. From that time onward, I carried her music and spirit with me.

I reconnected with King’s music after I was in highschool. I used to be about to audition for choir. I at all times leaned towards rock within the classical world. The three songs on my listing to audition with had been: You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away by the Beatles and I Feel the Earth Move and Natural Woman by Carole King. I narrowed it down to the 2 Carole King songs and was given the selection of present choir or madrigals.

Carole’s songs made me need to sing her melodies and her harmonies and I felt nearer to her whereas discovering my path as a singer even at that younger age. In my 30s, watching her musical on Broadway, I used to be overwhelmed with emotions of gratitude for her story. It confirmed the best way by which a lady can pursue her personal profession, have a household and obtain happiness. That is a fragile stability that I try for in my personal life every single day.

Joan Armatrading

One of the very best albums, ever, by one of the very best songwriters, ever. Period.

Devendra Banhart

The cowl of Tapestry has the identical welcoming ambiance of the report. It’s this musician saying: “Here I am. I’m not wearing a bunch of makeup. This is my home. I wrote these songs, and I’m not perfect.” It was the alternative of what was being bought at the moment. She’d written quite a bit of hits for different folks, however the message of Tapestry is that after you drop the artifice and be your self, that’s when the voice rings true.

I acquired into the album as a teen in California the place I used to be eager for a bygone period that solely existed in report covers: the Doors on the Whiskey-a-Go-Go or no matter. Tapestry is a really California-sounding report and has one thing of that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young getting-back-to-nature aspect, however with none of the theatrics. The panorama is inner, not exterior. It has themes of self-discovery. She’s additionally the grasp of sentimentality, nostalgia and homesickness however delivered with none syrup. She has a crystal-clear voice, and a approach of expressing excellent longing and melancholy like nobody else.

Lucinda Williams

I’d have simply turned 18 when Tapestry got here out, after I was actually being influenced by singers and songwriters. Carole King was an inspiration. She was a lady, and he or she wrote superb songs – so that you’d study by listening to It’s Too Late or no matter, time and again. She set the stage for different singer-songwriters who got here alongside after her, as a result of there wasn’t a market but and the business didn’t know what to do with us.

None of us singer-songwriters had been recognized for our voices, and we had to get previous that. I had to get previous the truth that I wasn’t going to sound like Linda Ronstadt or Joni Mitchell or Carole King, however from Carole I realized that you could settle for your individual voice and work inside your limitations, which was liberating.

Danielle Haim

When my sisters and I had been rising up, Tapestry was a key report in the home. Our mum additionally liked James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, who performed and sang on it, so it was on within the automobile quite a bit. Our mum was from Philly on the east coast, so it was at all times in my thoughts that Carole was additionally a Jewish east-coast lady. She’d write these superb, emotive songs and sing them in an virtually optimistic or carefree voice.

Once she left the songwriting world and began writing for herself, it acquired much less simple and extra private. So Far Away is basically advanced. The bridge is simply insane. I’ve heard that track so many occasions, however a couple of weeks in the past it got here on the radio after I was driving, and I used to be completely shocked.

When you write a track it’s virtually mystical. It feels as if the phrases simply come out and it may be months and even years later you realise: “That’s what was happening.” I’d love to know who these songs are about. I believe feminine artists are nice at simply letting all of it present. As artists, my sisters and I really feel like having Carole at all times in our lives undoubtedly impressed us.

Margo Price

Tapestry is precisely that: a sonic tapestry of some of the best songwriting and a masterclass in mixing the roots of folks, soul, rock and blues whereas by no means feeling compelled. My father instructed me in regards to the album after I was about 18, and it shook me to the core. It grew to become one of the blueprints that I measured sensible pop music by. Many have tried to imitate Carole’s sound, and nice artists like Aretha Franklin have interpreted her work as a result of her songs are timeless, limitless and, in a approach, defy style. This album has been one of my constants throughout quarantine. Even in its saddest moments, Carole’s voice can elevate my spirits and transfer mountains.

Natalie Merchant

It is a shock to admit that I may have been cognisant of an occasion that occurred 50 years in the past, however my summer time of 1971 reminiscences are fairly vivid. I used to be simply seven, however I may really feel the seismic modifications of the occasions: they had been shaking the foundations of my residence. The earth was transferring below my ft and the sky was tumbling down. My mother and father’ marriage was in items – my mom had thrown it in opposition to the kitchen wall in an effort to shatter the mould of her postwar, Catholic-American girl-self. She acquired a job, she wasn’t residence after we got here again from faculty, she didn’t drag us to mass on Sundays any extra, she stopped sporting a bra, and he or she stopped loving our father.

Her new buddies had been younger single girls. They drank crimson wine and communed deep into the evening over the ecstasies and sorrows of their unattached, sexually liberated, self-actualised lives. They idolised Gloria Steinem, learn Susan Sontag and dressed like Jane Fonda. And with out exception, all of them listened to the women of the canyon, that trinity of confessional singer-songwriters: Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King.

To say Tapestry was half of the soundtrack of my childhood can be a woeful understatement. It was a speckless mirror the place we women and girls noticed ourselves mirrored: pure, lovely, highly effective, fragile, lonely, joyous, regretful and resolute. It was a handful of songs and easy contradictions that had been all truths. It was a brimful cup of intoxicating freedom, and it was the souring aftertaste of all that headiness. It was realising the worth of putting out alone was rising weary of the world and craving the identical ties that had made us really feel so bound-up.

A talented craftswoman, Ms King wrought one thing sturdy with Tapestry that has not outworn its usefulness. Her 12 songs have been ringing clear and true for 50 years. We all perceive when she mourns fidelity and asks: “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place any more?” We understand how folks shift, how they modify, how they go away, and oftentimes depart us longing. When “something inside has died”, or we’re “down and troubled” and switch to music for shelter and comfort, we are going to at all times discover it on this album.

Rufus Wainwright

Tapestry was round our home after I was rising up, however I linked with it extra after I moved to California as a result of it’s the blueprint for anyone who’s beginning off in songwriting in LA. Carole King made this unbelievable transformation from Brill Building songwriter to performer, however she didn’t go loopy or self-destruct. She was in a position to stay a superb father or mother and – particularly now I’m a father – she has at all times been a task mannequin for me.

Tapestry is a bundle of feelings, and he or she doesn’t sound like anyone else. She wasn’t essentially the best singer, however she has a singular model and assault. She’s not pulling any punches: it’s an awesome lesson in how to be your self and achieve success. She’d labored with nice songwriters and artists, and knew all the good recording engineers and session gamers, and was in a position to channel every little thing she’d realized in her personal approach. Tapestry is the final word in phrases of doing what you need artistically and simply surviving as a human being within the report enterprise. She made this superb milestone in music with out having to sacrifice her soul to do it.

Natalie Mering, Weyes Blood

Tapestry is a component of the American songbook. I heard these songs even earlier than I knew who she was. I really like that ebook Girls Like Us, a trio of biographies of Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King and the story behind Tapestry. The report earlier than it [1970’s Writer] hadn’t carried out that nicely, so she had it in her head that this one had to be nice. She was meditating quite a bit. She was in all probability in some mental-spiritual prime, after which when she realised what fame entailed she was like: “No way.” She cared extra about her private life.

Even although she made Tapestry in LA, she’s very New York. It’s witty and spicy. I can relate to her musical sensibility – being classically educated like I used to be, however writing pop songs and singing these very deep issues. Tapestry is pretty much as good a gathering level as you get between common and a few kind of underground really feel. She was actually residing all that hippy stuff – vegetarianism, hippy skirts – and I believe that’s why it resonated. She’s the great motherly aspect of it. You can think about her making you a sandwich after the loopy hippies stole your stuff.

Stephin Merritt, the Magnetic Fields

The radical factor about Tapestry is its refusal to be iconic. The authentic Shirelles model of Will You Love Me Tomorrow, arguably the very best track of the 60s, is so clearly a masterpiece that King’s personal model may by no means compete with it. Instead, she sings it slowly and plaintively, with no flattering reverb, making the reply to the title, heartbreakingly, “Probably not”. Ouch!

Lucy Dacus

When I listened to Tapestry from my mother’s CD assortment, I used to be younger sufficient that it didn’t register pretty much as good or dangerous – it simply outlined what music seemed like to me, and it’s nonetheless a basis of how I perceive songwriting. She’s intelligent within the great way – queen of inner rhyme – and I really like how her melodies reinforce the tone of the lyrics. She retains it easy, however that’s what makes it common.

I’ll be sincere that the track of hers I’ve heard probably the most is Where You Lead because the Gilmore Girls theme – the model she sings along with her daughter. How many hours have I spent sitting on the sofa with my mother harmonising to that track? It’s a practice we’ve carried on a couple of occasions throughout quarantine over the telephone.

I additionally acquired to see the Broadway present about her, which was great, and actually made me realise how particular and uncommon it’s to write one track that can keep on a life that’s greater and longer than any human may hope for. And Carole King wrote tons of them! I’ll always remember watching her tribute on the Kennedy Center in 2015 on TV, when Aretha Franklin sang Natural Woman and he or she stood up from her seat of honour and sang alongside, arms within the air. I seemed up the video to remind myself of it and had a superb little ugly cry. I like to recommend it.

Merrill Garbus, Tune-Yards

Tapestry was slightly complicated to me after I first heard it as a full album, perhaps in my early 20s. I’d heard loads of these songs on oldies radio rising up. But why this down-to-earth, delicate tackle Natural Woman, on that track by James Taylor? And then that awakening: holy shit, Carole King wrote all these songs? A songwriter I’d recognized all my life, with out understanding her.

Tapestry is carried out and produced with out pretence. You can hear clearly the delicate twists and turns of the chord progressions, the nuanced decisions in concord. Those vocal harmonies on the finish of It’s Too Late and the bridge on Beautiful! Is it improper to pine for songs of such high quality? Songs allowed to shine by as they’re, unadorned and totally outstanding.

I even have to point out the cat on the duvet. It could sound trivial, however that was probably the most “me” I’d ever seen on a report cowl, and perhaps opened up the chance that an individual could possibly be humble and modest and human quite than superhuman, and be a triumphant musician.

Bethany Cosentino, Best Coast

It was a report my mother used to hear to quite a bit on the weekends when she may clear the home. I’d dance round the lounge “helping” her and singing alongside to I Feel the Earth Move – though I actually didn’t know the lyrics in any respect, I knew the melody and I knew I liked it. Listening to that album with my mother at all times made me really feel actually particular as a result of I may inform how a lot she liked it. To today, each time I hear to it, I vividly can keep in mind these Saturday mornings in the home I grew up in.

When I used to be developing with an idea for the album cowl of our newest report, Always Tomorrow, I used the duvet of Tapestry as an enormous reference level. I knew I wished it to be shot on movie, and I wished it to showcase a window in my residence on the time. Our remaining album cowl modified over time, however the photograph on the again is a bit of a homage to Tapestry. I’ve at all times been actually drawn to that album cowl. It is so easy, but it says a lot. And it truthfully appears the best way the album feels: cool, relaxed, cosy and considerably darkish.