100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 I Feel the Earth Move

02 So Far Away

03 It’s Too Late

04 Home Again

05 Beautiful

06 Way Over Yonder

07 You’ve Got a Friend

08 Where You Lead

09 Will You Love Me Tomorrow?

10 Smackwater Jack

11 Tapestry

12 (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman

Carole King had been around for many years before Tapestry, her second solo album, became the most popular album of its era. With her then husband, Gerry Goffin, King had written some of the most extraordinary pop songs for Ben E King, Dusty Springfield, Little Eva, Dionne Warwick, the Byrds and the Monkees. Then Bob Dylan and the Beatles created the era of the singer-songwriter and Tin Pan Alley was closing. To stay in the game, Carole King needed to reinvent herself.

After her divorce from Goffin in 1968, King fell into a new crowd that included James Taylor and his guitarist pal Danny ‘Kootch’ Kortchmar. She moved to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles where Joni Mitchell and all the other singer-songwriters congregated around bowls of organic brown rice. It was here that the cover of Tapestry was shot, depicting King as an empowered single woman and her cat.

Carole King’s story – a woman who leaves the shadow of her husband and finds her voice and a new career – mirrored the social upheaval that feminism was just starting to create. In this context, the fact that she couldn’t sing like Dusty Springfield added authenticity to the songs – a valuable commodity in that era of brown rice and organics.

King brought unparalleled experience to Tapestry. Most of the singer-songwriters of the time came from a folk music background. King’s songs drew from the harmonic structure of jazz, Motown and soul. Songs like ‘It’s Too Late’, ‘I Feel the Earth Move’ and ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ all start out in minor keys before changing into a major and then back again, taking the listener on an emotional journey. The band – guitarist Danny Kootch and bassist Charles Larkey with Russ Kunkel or alternatively Joel O’Brien on drums – formed a very tight unit. Producer Lou Adler had known King since 1961. Tapestry then was a selection of personal songs delivered by master craftspeople.

‘What I think happened in late ’70–’71 with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Carole, is that the listening public and the recordbuying public bought into the honesty and the vulnerability of the singer-songwriter,’ said Adler. ‘The emotions that they were laying out there allowed the people to be okay with theirs. And I think that along with the honesty of the records, there was a certain simplicity to the singer-songwriter’s record because they either start with vocal-guitar or piano-voice.’

Songs like ‘It’s Too Late’, ‘You’ve Got A Friend’ and ‘I Feel the Earth Move’ are pop romance songs for adults. A track like ‘So Far Away’ perfectly captured the restlessness of the era. King also included two of her biggest previously released songs. ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ was written by Goffin/King for Aretha Franklin and was a powerful song for African-Americans, but on Tapestry King reclaims it for the post-feminist women who faced the sharp end of their own struggle. King wrote ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ in 1960 at the age of 18. It allowed Gerry Goffin to quit his job as a chemist and was, in the hands of the Shirelles, their first #1 hit. At the time it was written this was every girl’s teenage dilemma – losing your virginity could lose you a husband. King slows the song down and turns this gorgeously expressed teen problem into an existential dilemma.

‘They’re timeless love songs,’ said Adler, explaining the massive success of Tapestry. ‘Those emotions have not gone away because of any change in technology or space or any other reason. They’re basic love songs, they’re basic emotions. It’s true-sounding instruments, and the emotions are still the emotions. She hit the chords.’