July 10, 2024 • 36 mins
There are all other songwriters, and then there is Carole King. Nobody’s ever had an epic career quite like the Brooklyn girl who spent the Sixties writing classic hits for other artists—then spent the Seventies writing her own.
With her 1971 solo classic Tapestry, she set the standards that all young singer-songwriters still aspire to reach. She’s always gone her own way as a performer, a composer, and an environmental activist. When Taylor Swift inducted King into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023, she simply called her “the greatest songwriter of all time.”
On this week’s special episode, hosts Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield are joined by the queen herself: Carole King. She tells the story of how she got started in songwriting, how she fell in love with making music, and how her artistry changed over the years as her life did. Our hosts also discuss the legend that is Carole King, why they idolize her, and how she changed all the rules of pop music with Tapestry and “It’s Too Late.”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to five hundred Greatest Songs, a podcast based on
Rolling Stones hugely popular, influential, and sometimes controversialist. I'm Britney Spanis, now.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm Rob Sheffield. We're here to shed light on the
greatest songs ever made and discover what makes them so great,
and also to discover what makes Carol King the greatest
songwriter ever. And It's Too Late a classic of seventies
Carol King.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, this episode is entirely about Carol. Carol's entries on
the list. I mean, when we were playing together a
list of the songs that we want to talk about
in episodes, we wanted to do. This was, I mean
a no brainer, I think for both of us to
do an episode dedicated to miss King. And as Taylor
Swift said in her induction of Carol at the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame in twenty twenty one, she
(00:46):
is the greatest songwriter of all time. I think that's apparent.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Her main competition would be the Beatles, who never stop
saying that they started writing songs because they used to
see the Goffin King credit. They were looking at the
songwriting credits on the label and the two names that
always jumped out at them were Goffen King and Smokey
Robinson and that's why they started writing songs. And John
(01:11):
Lennon always said, when we started, we wanted to be
the Goffin King of England, and they kept that going
their entire career.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, and there are two goffen King compositions on the list.
We have Aretha Franklin's You Make Me Feel Like a
Natural Woman, which lands at number ninety and the Charelles
Will You Love Me Tomorrow is at number one fifty one,
and then of course Carol's own hit It's Too Late
off of her seminal nineteen seventy one album Tapestry, lands
at number three forty six. So we are you know
(01:41):
just I mean, I think fans of every era of
Carol's songwriting and composing and her skills just from the
get go, from.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
The get go, and that she became such a legend
behind the scenes in the sixties writing all these classic
songs for other artists from you Know, We Love Tomorrow,
like the Cherell's which is on the list, but One
Fine Day by the Chiffons, Some kind of Wonderful by
the Drifters, the Locomotion by Little Leva, so many classics
(02:11):
up on the roof by the drifters. Any of these
songs could be on the list. But for her to
step into her own voice in the seventies as a
singer songwriter, and it's funny that we know her voice
so well, but for all those people hearing Tapestry, it
was the first time they were hearing a voice that
they'd heard through her songs. Yeah, for all those years.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
And of course I mean Tapestry as an album, and
we'll get even more into it as we talked about
this episode. But anyone who considers himself a songwriter, that
is an album that they immediately cite. I mean, I
can't think of a single artist on the charts right
now who would not immediately cite Tapestry as a foundational
text for them or the saying that they grew up
(02:50):
listening to is something that they learned how to write
songs from Carol as an composer, as a writer, is
I mean a blueprint forever, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
And for her to make that transition from a pro
songwriter the real building, the famous cubicles with people at
their desks with pianos just banging out songs minute to minute,
hour to hour, nine to five, and just getting so
many hits done at the same time. And for her
to go from that to the Laurel Canyon wearing denims,
(03:23):
hanging around with her cat, you know, in her Laurel
Canyon pad, to be photographed for the greatest album cover
of all time, Tapestry. Such a revelation for everybody in
music to hear an adult woman whose voice they didn't know,
who had not been famous when she was younger, but
who became as a thirty somethingter divorce, you know, like
(03:46):
with a lot of really hard living behind her already,
and hearing that in these songs and songs like It's
too Late or so far away, those are really adult
songs in a way that was totally new.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
I mean, what I love about Carol's story is that,
I mean, she's incredibly talented, right, but it's kind of
like that kind of rare mix of incredible talent and
this amazing kind of gift of songwriting and musicality, but
also just like amazing timing and right place, right time
of like being part of two of the most formative
communities in rock music history. I mean, she grew up
(04:18):
in New York City. She you know, was going to
high school with Paul Simon, Neil Sadaka. She ends up
meeting Jerry Goffin, who becomes her husband and of course
her songwriting partner for this incredible decade where they you know,
basically were some of the biggest pimmakers of that time,
but you know, they find themselves in that real building
community of songwriters that you know. Of course we talked
(04:40):
to Jeff Barry and are be my Baby episode who
was a part of that. I mean, this was like
a really really important time for pop music where there
was these brilliant young songwriters who were writing some of
the most classic songs, songs that are standards now that
they probably could not have even imagined would continue to
be as memorable and on the radio as they are now.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah, so many of the great writers who've come since then,
really every wave of songwriters since then has been so
inspired by those songs and trying to build on them.
So many of the people in the seventies who are
writing songs, who you know, worked with Carol King became
peers and Neil Young is a great example someone who
really took so much of his alotic sense was inspired
by Carol King's melodies, and that you know, he got
(05:26):
a lot of his early recording playing on songs that
she wrote, like for the Monkeys As We Go Along,
But that she had so many songs that were huge,
mega famous hits, like you said, standards, and yet for
every one of those, there's so many songs that are
deep cuts. I mean, it seems strange to call any
Carol Kings song a deep cut, but she was so
(05:46):
prolific with such high quality over such a long time
that there's so many songs there like waiting for anybody
to discover.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, And of course the goffin King combo was Jerry
was Ryan Rics and Carol was composing the music for
these songs, and they ended up having their breakthrough with
of course will You Love Me Tomorrow on the list.
I mean, that is like the girl group standard and classic.
That is a song that I've grew up listening to
my entire family loves like. It's just like a devastating, beautiful,
(06:17):
gorgeous song that of course ended up becoming not only
the breakthrough hit for Carol and Jerry, but also ended
up hitting number one for the Charell's. They became the
first all African American, all female group to hit number
one on the charts, and that was a massive breakthrough
for everyone involved. I mean that song is something that
you know, is I feel like kind of every devastating
(06:39):
love song tries to be.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, the Cherrelle is such an amazing story in themselves,
such heroic figures in so many ways, and the connection
between them and the Goff and Kings song is just
one of the amazing connections between groups and writers that
they just they got each other's sensibilities on that level.
So even a song that's not as famous, like what
(07:02):
a Sweet Thing that was, which was a hit, you know,
not a major hits, not when you ever hear on
oldies radio or anything, but boy, if that was the
only collaboration that they had, that would be yeah itself.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah, it was just that like that would be enough
like to still be considered legendary and kind of you know,
it would make the list no matter what.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, Tonight's and Night another like brilliant like collaboration between
the Shrells and Goff and King and something that in
her melodies, his words, their voices, there was just so
much chemistry and so many different stories, and that's why
people go on listening to these songs and rewriting them
as time goes by.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yeah. And of course Carol and Jerry became some of
the most in demand songwriters of this time. I mean
they you know, until nineteen sixty eight when their marriage
dissolved and they stopped working together. I mean, they were
writing hits for everyone. Of course, they Wreatha Franklin song
You make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman would end
up becoming a signature song for Aretha, one that Aretha
even sang to Carol at her Candy Center honors a
(08:05):
couple of years before Aretha died, which is just a
beautiful performance to kind of witness Carol witnessing Aretha singing
that in honor of.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Her, Yeah, is super chal Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
And I love the story of that song where it
was the Atlantic Records co owner and producer Jerry Jerry Wexler,
who just kind of had like an idea in his
car one day and was like, you know, it was
like thinking about like what a natural man is and
just like yelled at Carol and Jerry write a song
about a natural woman for Aretha. And then you get this, Yeah,
(08:37):
one of Aretha's best performances on record, I mean, which
is already a difficult task to even put what is
a great Aretha Franklin performance on record? But this one
just happens to be one of the best ones written
by Carol and Jerry, and it's perfect.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And one of the great moments. There's nothing but great
moments on the VH one Divas Concerts. Yes, yes, the one.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I not bring the hot first.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Ye, Yes, I knew it was coming. I thought i'd,
you know, like you know, Grease the Runway, but that
you have Carol King on stage and Aretha Franklin and
lots of other famous people who hate each other and
say really nasty things about each other in the memoirs,
no names coming to mind at the moment, but a
(09:24):
lot of ego on the stage and a lot of
competition on the stage, but just the sheer deference to
the fact that Aretha Franklin is there and Carol King
is there and they're singing this song. It's just really
just kind of a mind blowing moment.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
I mean, I like, I mean, Aretha hut a lot
of beefs with people, which is one of my favorite
things about her. She never had one with Carol. I
don't think there's anything. She never had a bad word
to say about Carol that I cannot think of one.
And if she did, I don't want to know. I
don't want to believe they ever had anything. You know,
Aretha a lot of people she had words for, and
they were some of the funniest and best words ever
(09:57):
ever spoken by anyone. But she never had a Yeah,
the word frocks.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah, that word ruined forever.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Like beautiful, beautiful gowns, beautiful.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Gowns, the shadeath the Franklin could put into one noun
and like change the history of that.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Now, even someone calling someone else a queen of anything. Yeah,
But she she had nothing but respect for Carol King,
which I think is the highest amount of respect she
can get. Yes, absolutely, Franklin, Yes, respects.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
You never put the word queen in your album title.
She will find a way to defeat you whatever it takes.
But yet a beautiful moment and just the connection between them,
I mean, it's just really amazing. How and on Tapestry,
a classic album, you know, it wasn't the first time
she made an album. She did the Writer album than
the album with the group The City.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I really loved the Writer album.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's really really great. I know you love the City
album too.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, Like I love the Carol's Laurel Canyon years are
are just wow.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah yeah for such a quintessential like New York woman. Yeah,
like and Shan we went to LA because like Jerry Goffin,
like when the marriage like exploded and he was like, oh,
I'm going out to LA So she decided, well she
should move there too, so we could have contact with
his daughters. You know, wasn't her decision to go there,
(11:21):
and it wasn't like he ran the decision by her.
She made this decision unilaterally for the good of everybody else.
So very Carol King wait to do it. But the
way she found to thrive out there and to make Tapestry,
and the famous scene of like she's in the studio
making Tapestry, it's the same studio where Joni Mitchell is
down the hall making Blue at the same time, and
(11:41):
the carpenters are down in the third studio and they're
making an album that has rainy days and Mondays on it,
which is you know, that's that's the closest they got
to a Carol King or Joni Mitchell type of song,
and James Taylor is in his studio a block away,
so he's bopping over to play on Jonie's album and
Carol's album. And like you said, this community that just
thrives around the music.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, I mean, it's already incredibly lucky to find herself
in one great songwriter community. But Carol found herself in
two very exciting times in music. I mean going to
Laurel Kanyon in what was it nineteen sixty nine that
she moved there. Like if I could live anywhere at any point,
it would be nineteen sixty nine Laurel Canyon, Like it
would be like it would be that like hands down,
(12:23):
you know, like that was just I mean it was
like Joni and James and Carly and you know the
Crosby Stills, Nash and Young like it. It's all of
these incredible songwriters who would end up defining the next
you know, decade in a on of rock music, of
folk music. Is I mean, she found herself there and
found her voice, She found you know, her her singing voice,
(12:43):
her writing voice, you know, until this time again, like
she had been so much the composer to Jerry's words,
and so now this was kind of her finding that
voice in a multitude of ways.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Yeah, with this group.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Of people who were writing albums that would go on
to not only be successful and classic, but end up,
i mean, the most important influences on pop music.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Absolutely with Tapestry, where she is, you know, like you said,
already one of the biggest influences. And she's singing these
songs from her past, you know, in addition to like
all these like devastating new songs like It's Too Late
and so far Away, but she sings you make Me
Feel like a natural woman and will You Love Me Tomorrow?
(13:30):
And they're both. It's funny only in terms of time,
like just a few years past the original versions, but
you can hear that so much time is past. She's
been through so much since those songs were written. And
for people hearing Tapestry, it was the first time to
hear those songs and think, oh wow, this is the
woman who wrote these songs and who didn't have a
(13:51):
public voice until now.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
She's this great story that she tells about how she
was on stage with James Taylor and it was his show.
She was just his pian player. She was too shy,
she never wanted to sing in public, and James Taylor
just without warning her, just told the crowd, you know,
this is Carl King. She wrote all your favorite songs.
You don't know her name, but you know all her songs,
and now she's going to sing up on the roof
(14:14):
for you. And he did not clear that with her,
and she was forced to just sit there and sing
up on the roof in front of other people for
the first time in her life and found out that
she loved it. Yeah, and they loved it where she did,
but everybody loved it.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
I mean, I love her version of will You Love
Me Tomorrow on Tapestry, I mean just like I mean,
given the Joni Mitchell background vocals on that song, which
already going to win me over, but I mean just
kind of that slowed down sort of devastating, like really
pulling out the sadness in that song and the kind
(14:48):
of longing in that song. It does so much remind
me of that kind of the re recording of both
sides now that Jonie does right where like she like
revisits this song that she wrote in her youth as
an older woman looking back and kind of adds a
new meaning to it. I mean, like you said, it
wasn't that long in between, but still kind of feels
like a lifetime and feels like so much has passed
in between those two moments on like the Charrell's version
(15:12):
plus Carol's own take on it.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, yeah, and those are just you know, she learned
how to write songs by writing for other voices, So
she wrote all these songs with Goffin, with Tony Stern.
All these voices have heard themselves in these songs, and
so many amazing different, weird cover versions of all these
songs just people hearing them and saying, yeah, this is
(15:37):
my voice. And Carol King just writes in that way
that people just hear themselves in it. It's funny a
song that from Tapestry that stands out on the album
just because Tony Stern's lyric is very different. But where
you lead yeah and the Gilmore Girls, Yes, the song.
Carol King over the year, she talked about that song
and she thought it was outdating when they did it
(15:58):
on Tapestry, that it was you know that she thought
it was so subservient to the man in the song
and it does like it's really an outliar on the album.
There aren't any other songs that are just like you know,
I'll follow you around. And it was only years later
when it became the Gilmore Girls theme that Carol King
has always said, that's what she realized what the song
was always about, that it was always meant to be that,
(16:18):
and Tony Stern was like, yeah, let's redo this, Let's
make it the mother daughter song that was always meant
to be and sang it with Louise Goffin and for
her to take this song that was already out there
in the world and the song story changed just because
of the way people heard it. To me, that's a
beautiful tribute to Carol King as a songwriter that this
(16:40):
song could totally transform and we always think of it
as a mother daughter song now, Yeah, I mean, you know,
like that's really what.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
It was like.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
She said, that's what the song was always meant to be,
and took Gilmore Girls for her to hear that.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah, I think that's kind of the beauty of her
talent and her legacy. I mean, I guess maybe the
different that comes from her experience versus someone who starts
off as a performer write and starts off as like
someone whose songs they're writing for themselves, that they're performing.
Is that she has like this innate understanding of all
the possibilities a song can hold, Like she has this
sort of innate understanding of the idea that there is
(17:17):
so much beauty to someone else singing that song and
what they can curry to it, and that these versions
can coexist, and that it's meant to evolve, and it's
meant to change. It's meant to you know, turn into
and morph into so many things as it ages and
is allowed to exist in so many different formats. So
I think that's always been the beauty of watching kind
of Carol react and allow her songs to be used
(17:40):
in all these different ways and even rework them herself.
And like you mentioned with the Gilmore Girls version and
even just her own versions of will You Love Me
Tomorrow and her version of One Fine Day and you
know of you make you feel like a natural woman,
like she is not trying to take away from the
original versions of the song. She's like letting them kind
of grow and mutate as their too.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah, it's such a brilliant point that you make and
so crucial that she was a writer before she was
a performer or ever thought she'd be a performer. You know,
James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, they were singing in front
of people before they even wrote songs. They were entertaining
with the guitar. But she was a songwriter who commuted.
She took the subway into to write the songs and
(18:21):
would look at people and could walk around unnoticed like
a regular person. She's always told the story of the
song Beautiful and how she came up with the idea
for that song while she was writing the subway on
her way to work. You know, it's certainly not something
James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, like, they were so famous they
couldn't just you know, ride the subway and come up
with ideas for songs. But Carol King always had that
(18:42):
and never lost that.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah, I mean that's why the crazy stat I had
no idea was like the actual stat But I mean,
Tapestry was the for over forty years, kept the lexi
of being the best selling album by a solo female artist,
and it was only broken by Adele twenty one, which
is like insane that that was, like how long it
was able to happen. I mean, it's very clear just
(19:05):
because all these songs are such incredible classics. And again,
like talk to any I mean, we've interviewed so many
artists that I mean, I can't even count the amount
of times that Carol King has been brought up without
me having to bring her up, which I'm happy to do,
but you know, like the amount of times that it
comes up in no matter what age, what generation, where
they're from, Tapestry Carol, she is brought up constantly, and
(19:30):
I know you have the same. It was like exact
experience with so many artists you've spoken to.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
She's always the standard that you know a songwriter wants
to reach, whether that's Jonan and Paul McCartney in the
sixties or you know, like Adele and Taylor Swift, you know,
like the in the twenties. It's always that ideal of
like a songwriter who is very pop and very real
at the same time. I mean, I didn't know that
(19:54):
about how she held a record and a Dell broke
it and it's such a that's so perfect and simple.
You know, Adele would be the first one to say that.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Adel would probably I mean at twenty one is Tapestry. Yeah,
we are joined now by singer, songwriter, environmentalist, all around
legend Carol King. Thank you, thank you so much. We
are both so excited to have you on here.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Thank you. It's a pleasure to see you and talk
with you.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Before we get into some of the songs that we
talk about in this episode. I mean, you are, for
so many people a songwriting and composition blueprint. I'm curious
for you when you first started out and started exploring
that talent for yourself. Who were your blueprints and influences.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Well, my influence just go way back before there was
a Rolling Stone magazine, certainly before you guys, But my
earliest influences were Broadway. My mom, she loved theater and
she took me to Broadway shows. And I think my
all time favorite song is called Hello Young Lovers. It's
(21:06):
by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein the third The melody
is so simple, the chords are unexpected, and I love that.
I loved that so much that I tried to do
that in my whole songwriting career. And the lyric, I mean,
it's just such a simple, beautiful song. And any song
(21:29):
in West Side story. Those are some of my early influences,
you know. And then rock and Roll happened when I
was only thirteen, and I used to listen to Alan
Freed's show, and that was my first introduction to R
and B. And I loved the fusion between music from
the black community. I had never heard any of that.
(21:50):
I was like, whoa, and that was Alan Freed brought
that to my generation. So I was highly influenced by that.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
And how did you sort of begin to bridge the
those two parts of yourself, the influence from Broadway and
the influence of you know, people like Steven Sondheim with
rock and rolling, with R and B, how did you
kind of find a way to connect those Well.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
I was like a sponge. I would hear music and
I would take it in and incorporate it into my being.
And I have this gift of channeling it out and
being able to take it in and put it out.
And that's how I wrote songs as a melody writer.
(22:31):
I wasn't writing lyrics then, and the lyrics I wrote
when I first started out, before I met Jerry Goffin
were terrible, you know. They were like baby, baby, baby,
babysitting I'm a baby baby. It really is a gift
that I have to take in the kind of music
(22:51):
that I want to be writing. If I'm writing for
an artist, I put myself in the mind and the
vocal range. I just sort of get inside that artist,
and I'm able to write for an artist in that way.
I can still do that. I haven't been writing very
(23:12):
much lately, but I've had occasion to write a couple
of things, and it made me very happy to know
I can still do that. It's just part of my
being that I can do that, and I'm blessed and grateful.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Thank you. Those songs are part of our being. We
love to argue over our favorites because you've written so
many classics, in so many different styles and in so
many eras. Some of them songs that you sang, some
of them songs that other people saying. So we can
argue about our favorite Carol King songs forever. It's almost
difficult to even guess, like which ones are the ones
(23:47):
that are your favorites.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
You know, it's hard to have a favorite because there
are so many songs that I wrote that I really love,
and I'm really honored that you chose three of them
to be in your top five hundred, that's pretty amazing.
And there Will You Love Me Tomorrow? And a Natural
Woman and both of which Jerry wrote the lyric for,
(24:12):
and It's Too Late, which the lyric was written by Ms.
Tony Stern. But it's hard to pick a favorite because
it's like which is your favorite child? You know, I
have four children, and I don't have a favorite. I
love them all. Speaking of children, two of my children
are in the music business. One is Louise Goffin, who
(24:36):
is a songwriter in her own writer. And not only
is she's a songwriter, but she founded the Goffin King Foundation,
which is dedicated to empowering songwriters.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
She's a legend in her own right.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yeah, kind of, you know, But I wanted to mention
this songwriting because I think it's so amazing that she's
taken on this mission of sort of bringing it to
new generations and inspiring new generations of songwriters. Yeah. Lets
just check out the Goufin and King Foundation.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
And to speak to the songwriting legend of your daughter's parents,
I mean, I'm curious what the chemistry or working sort
of way that you and Jerry would write songs together.
Was it something where you know he would work on
a lyric first, or would you work on a composition first,
or would it be kind of simultaneous and kind of
at once where you would build a song like will
(25:32):
you Love Me Tomorrow? Together? Or you make Me feel
like a natural woman together?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
In that way, every song is different, even with the
same writer. For example, Tony Stern put the lyric to
It's too Late, She handed it to me. I put
it on the piano, on the typewritten page. You know,
on the piano. The music just came out of me.
And if you think about it, like if you just say,
(25:57):
stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time,
there's something wrong here. There can be no denying. You
can almost hear the music, or I could certainly just
by saying it as I'm playing the piano. The music
just came, and that that song got written with will
(26:18):
You Love Me Tomorrow? Again? I think Jerry wrote the
first verse first, and I don't remember if it happened
literally the way they depicted in the show. I don't
know if it was overnight or not. But I remember
seeing that first verse in his handwriting and the music
came and I remember thinking, this is a funny story.
(26:42):
I remember thinking when I was writing it, it kind
of almost sounded like a country song. But then, you know,
it turned out it wasn't for a number of reasons.
But I heard later in later years that the Cherelles
didn't want to do it because it sounded to country.
That's the thing that I've never put together. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
I mean there's also that those incredibly lush string arrangements
that I know that you arranged for that song. Can
you talk a little bit about kind of adding that
layer which makes it predecidedly kind of further away from
those sort of country influence roots from it.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Right. There was a hit then called there Goes My Baby,
which I think was Benny King's first hit as a
solo artist after the Drifters. He left the Drifters, and
that was I believe produced by lebre and Stoller, Jerry
Leeber and Mike Stoller, and they got an arranger and
(27:46):
again I think that was Stanley Applebaum, but it had
strings on it. Here's this great R and B singer singing,
you know, there goes my Baby, and you have timpany Oh,
you know these are orchestral instruments, and they are putting
it on a rhythm and blues song sung by a
(28:09):
black singer, and you know who sings from the church, right,
They've put it all together. And Jerry and I heard
that and we were floored. And I think that's what
made us decide to use strings on it. I don't
think that came from the producer. I think we wanted
to put strings on it.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yeah, he wrote so many great songs for the Cherells.
My personal favorite is what a sweet thing that was?
Like that song just destroys me. You have so many
songs like that that you wrote for those artists that
we think of as the girl group artists from that era,
that gave them this voice from your melodies.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Well, thank you. Yeah, that resonated. You know, first of all,
I'm a girl. But Jerry wrote the lyrics, and he
also wrote the lyrics I'm going to do what you
call segue. He wrote the lyrics to you make me
feel like a natural woman. He also wrote not with me,
saving all my love for you. So he seemed to
(29:11):
have that gift of getting inside the head of anybody
of any gender, of any you know age. He had
that same gift that I have for music that he
had for lyrics. And I don't know how we found
each other in the universe, but I'm really grateful that
we did.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
I mean, I've always been so in love with and
kind of obsessed with this community of songwriters that you
were part of in Laurel Canyon and as you were
working on your first two albums, finding James Taylor and
Joni Mitchell and of course Tony Stern, who who was
very instrumental in those first two albums. I'm curious kind of,
you know, thinking about you know, you and James and
(29:50):
Joni and how foundational those albums that you worked on
around then the songs that you've written. Could any of
you have imagined the kind of longevity and staying and
remaining influence and impact that the music you were writing
in Laurel Canyon and during that era would have.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
The answer is no, we didn't. We were too busy
being that community. That's true of the songwriter era in
New York. I was again, you know, I feel fortunate
to have met Jerry Goffin, and I was in the
right place at the right time for the birth of
rock and roll and the birth of the songwriter era.
(30:30):
There was a songwriter era before me, in the thirties
and forties. You know, you sort of visualize the music
publisher and the elevator, you know, and the songwriter saying, hey,
I got this great song, you know, in one of
the buildings, in the real building. That's a real thing.
But that predated when I was coming of age. And
(30:51):
so when I was coming of age, I literally could
walk into the office of Atlantic Records, which I think
was populated with Jerry Wexler, Armitt Erdigan, Armitt's brother, and
Miriam I forget her last name, who was their accountant.
So I could walk in and they had a piano,
(31:12):
and I could sit down and say, want to buy
a song? You can't do that anymore, But so that
was then, and again I didn't know I was part
of a thing, you know. And the same thing was
true in Laurel Canyon. When I moved out there, there
was a music business in California that was totally film oriented,
(31:36):
right because Hollywood and the music business in California before
that era was people writing songs for movies, right. And
then just before I got there, there started to be
record companies, little independent record companies like Liberty Records, and
(31:57):
I think that was Bobby Vee's label. And so when
I got out there, other people were coming there with
their guitars, and Peter Asher moved out there, and there
was this whole community in Crosby Stoles and Nash and
Jonie and Bonnie Raid and all the people that you
know were I don't know if she lived out there,
(32:19):
but she, you know, she was part of the people
that played at the Troubadour. And so that was another
thing that was being born, which is the music business
apart from films. And I was there for that too. Again,
like thank you, I had that gift that was able
(32:40):
to rise to the occasion. I also work hard, you know,
I did the work, but it's a coming of good
fortune and a gift.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
You've this great story in your book A Natural Woman,
which I love, where you're talking about singing when you
hadn't planned on singing in front of people that you
were just playing piano with James Taylor and he just
put you on the spot and made you sing a song.
And for you to go from a writer for other
artists to finding your own voice as a performer as
(33:10):
well as a writer that symbolized such a huge change
in terms of how people experience music to this day.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Yeah, it was. And I guess I don't consider myself
a great singer. I think I've learned how to be
a really good singer. I really do think I've learned
how to how to be that, and there are skills
like that you put to work in service of that.
But I am a channel, and I was, as a writer,
(33:38):
the vehicle to present the song to the publisher, to
the artist, to the arranger, and the transition to becoming
the person to present it to the world. James knew this,
That's why he put me on. Lou Adler knew this,
that's why he signed me. Other people who signed me
saw this. I never saw the connection that all I
(34:02):
had to do was be the same channel I was
in singing it for an artist or a producer or
an arranger or a band, and that's all I did.
But when I happened to do that on Tapestry, it
was the right thing, and people went, oh, this is authentic,
(34:23):
this is real, This is speaking to me from somebody
who's just like me. And that's I think that's how
the transition happened. But I never thought of myself. To me,
there was a barrier between me and an audience that
was any bigger than a room full of people who
(34:45):
I was playing a song for. And I learned from
James that there is no barrier.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Thank you so much, Carol, Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
I don't even know how to begin to thank you
for all the songs, Sweet Season maybe my favorite, like
so Far Away. These are deeply embedded in our lives.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
I appreciate that. And honestly, I hear from people all
the time, and people come up and they say this
when they'll name a song or their name tapestry and
they say that meant so much to me. And I
bet you've heard that a million times, and I've honestly
gotten to the place where I really know. But you're
(35:31):
telling me that for the first time, and so I'm
saying that to you. Thank you, I hear you, I
feel you, and I love you.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Thank you, Thank you so much, so much, Thank you
so much for listening to Rolling Stones five hundred great songs.
This podcast is brought to you by Rolling Stone and iHeartMedia.
Written and hosted by me, Rob Sheffield and Britney Spanos.
Executive produced by Gus Winner, Jason Fine, alex Dale and
Christian Horde, and produced by A Cannon, with music supervision
(36:02):
by Eric Zeiler.
Welcome to five hundred Greatest Songs, a podcast based on
Rolling Stones hugely popular, influential, and sometimes controversialist. I'm Britney Spanis, now.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm Rob Sheffield. We're here to shed light on the
greatest songs ever made and discover what makes them so great,
and also to discover what makes Carol King the greatest
songwriter ever. And It's Too Late a classic of seventies
Carol King.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, this episode is entirely about Carol. Carol's entries on
the list. I mean, when we were playing together a
list of the songs that we want to talk about
in episodes, we wanted to do. This was, I mean
a no brainer, I think for both of us to
do an episode dedicated to miss King. And as Taylor
Swift said in her induction of Carol at the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame in twenty twenty one, she
(00:46):
is the greatest songwriter of all time. I think that's apparent.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Her main competition would be the Beatles, who never stop
saying that they started writing songs because they used to
see the Goffin King credit. They were looking at the
songwriting credits on the label and the two names that
always jumped out at them were Goffen King and Smokey
Robinson and that's why they started writing songs. And John
(01:11):
Lennon always said, when we started, we wanted to be
the Goffin King of England, and they kept that going
their entire career.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, and there are two goffen King compositions on the list.
We have Aretha Franklin's You Make Me Feel Like a
Natural Woman, which lands at number ninety and the Charelles
Will You Love Me Tomorrow is at number one fifty one,
and then of course Carol's own hit It's Too Late
off of her seminal nineteen seventy one album Tapestry, lands
at number three forty six. So we are you know
(01:41):
just I mean, I think fans of every era of
Carol's songwriting and composing and her skills just from the
get go, from.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
The get go, and that she became such a legend
behind the scenes in the sixties writing all these classic
songs for other artists from you Know, We Love Tomorrow,
like the Cherell's which is on the list, but One
Fine Day by the Chiffons, Some kind of Wonderful by
the Drifters, the Locomotion by Little Leva, so many classics
(02:11):
up on the roof by the drifters. Any of these
songs could be on the list. But for her to
step into her own voice in the seventies as a
singer songwriter, and it's funny that we know her voice
so well, but for all those people hearing Tapestry, it
was the first time they were hearing a voice that
they'd heard through her songs. Yeah, for all those years.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
And of course I mean Tapestry as an album, and
we'll get even more into it as we talked about
this episode. But anyone who considers himself a songwriter, that
is an album that they immediately cite. I mean, I
can't think of a single artist on the charts right
now who would not immediately cite Tapestry as a foundational
text for them or the saying that they grew up
(02:50):
listening to is something that they learned how to write
songs from Carol as an composer, as a writer, is
I mean a blueprint forever, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
And for her to make that transition from a pro
songwriter the real building, the famous cubicles with people at
their desks with pianos just banging out songs minute to minute,
hour to hour, nine to five, and just getting so
many hits done at the same time. And for her
to go from that to the Laurel Canyon wearing denims,
(03:23):
hanging around with her cat, you know, in her Laurel
Canyon pad, to be photographed for the greatest album cover
of all time, Tapestry. Such a revelation for everybody in
music to hear an adult woman whose voice they didn't know,
who had not been famous when she was younger, but
who became as a thirty somethingter divorce, you know, like
(03:46):
with a lot of really hard living behind her already,
and hearing that in these songs and songs like It's
too Late or so far away, those are really adult
songs in a way that was totally new.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
I mean, what I love about Carol's story is that,
I mean, she's incredibly talented, right, but it's kind of
like that kind of rare mix of incredible talent and
this amazing kind of gift of songwriting and musicality, but
also just like amazing timing and right place, right time
of like being part of two of the most formative
communities in rock music history. I mean, she grew up
(04:18):
in New York City. She you know, was going to
high school with Paul Simon, Neil Sadaka. She ends up
meeting Jerry Goffin, who becomes her husband and of course
her songwriting partner for this incredible decade where they you know,
basically were some of the biggest pimmakers of that time,
but you know, they find themselves in that real building
community of songwriters that you know. Of course we talked
(04:40):
to Jeff Barry and are be my Baby episode who
was a part of that. I mean, this was like
a really really important time for pop music where there
was these brilliant young songwriters who were writing some of
the most classic songs, songs that are standards now that
they probably could not have even imagined would continue to
be as memorable and on the radio as they are now.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah, so many of the great writers who've come since then,
really every wave of songwriters since then has been so
inspired by those songs and trying to build on them.
So many of the people in the seventies who are
writing songs, who you know, worked with Carol King became
peers and Neil Young is a great example someone who
really took so much of his alotic sense was inspired
by Carol King's melodies, and that you know, he got
(05:26):
a lot of his early recording playing on songs that
she wrote, like for the Monkeys As We Go Along,
But that she had so many songs that were huge,
mega famous hits, like you said, standards, and yet for
every one of those, there's so many songs that are
deep cuts. I mean, it seems strange to call any
Carol Kings song a deep cut, but she was so
(05:46):
prolific with such high quality over such a long time
that there's so many songs there like waiting for anybody
to discover.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, And of course the goffin King combo was Jerry
was Ryan Rics and Carol was composing the music for
these songs, and they ended up having their breakthrough with
of course will You Love Me Tomorrow on the list.
I mean, that is like the girl group standard and classic.
That is a song that I've grew up listening to
my entire family loves like. It's just like a devastating, beautiful,
(06:17):
gorgeous song that of course ended up becoming not only
the breakthrough hit for Carol and Jerry, but also ended
up hitting number one for the Charell's. They became the
first all African American, all female group to hit number
one on the charts, and that was a massive breakthrough
for everyone involved. I mean that song is something that
you know, is I feel like kind of every devastating
(06:39):
love song tries to be.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, the Cherrelle is such an amazing story in themselves,
such heroic figures in so many ways, and the connection
between them and the Goff and Kings song is just
one of the amazing connections between groups and writers that
they just they got each other's sensibilities on that level.
So even a song that's not as famous, like what
(07:02):
a Sweet Thing that was, which was a hit, you know,
not a major hits, not when you ever hear on
oldies radio or anything, but boy, if that was the
only collaboration that they had, that would be yeah itself.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah, it was just that like that would be enough
like to still be considered legendary and kind of you know,
it would make the list no matter what.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, Tonight's and Night another like brilliant like collaboration between
the Shrells and Goff and King and something that in
her melodies, his words, their voices, there was just so
much chemistry and so many different stories, and that's why
people go on listening to these songs and rewriting them
as time goes by.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yeah. And of course Carol and Jerry became some of
the most in demand songwriters of this time. I mean
they you know, until nineteen sixty eight when their marriage
dissolved and they stopped working together. I mean, they were
writing hits for everyone. Of course, they Wreatha Franklin song
You make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman would end
up becoming a signature song for Aretha, one that Aretha
even sang to Carol at her Candy Center honors a
(08:05):
couple of years before Aretha died, which is just a
beautiful performance to kind of witness Carol witnessing Aretha singing
that in honor of.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Her, Yeah, is super chal Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
And I love the story of that song where it
was the Atlantic Records co owner and producer Jerry Jerry Wexler,
who just kind of had like an idea in his
car one day and was like, you know, it was
like thinking about like what a natural man is and
just like yelled at Carol and Jerry write a song
about a natural woman for Aretha. And then you get this, Yeah,
(08:37):
one of Aretha's best performances on record, I mean, which
is already a difficult task to even put what is
a great Aretha Franklin performance on record? But this one
just happens to be one of the best ones written
by Carol and Jerry, and it's perfect.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And one of the great moments. There's nothing but great
moments on the VH one Divas Concerts. Yes, yes, the one.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I not bring the hot first.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Ye, Yes, I knew it was coming. I thought i'd,
you know, like you know, Grease the Runway, but that
you have Carol King on stage and Aretha Franklin and
lots of other famous people who hate each other and
say really nasty things about each other in the memoirs,
no names coming to mind at the moment, but a
(09:24):
lot of ego on the stage and a lot of
competition on the stage, but just the sheer deference to
the fact that Aretha Franklin is there and Carol King
is there and they're singing this song. It's just really
just kind of a mind blowing moment.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
I mean, I like, I mean, Aretha hut a lot
of beefs with people, which is one of my favorite
things about her. She never had one with Carol. I
don't think there's anything. She never had a bad word
to say about Carol that I cannot think of one.
And if she did, I don't want to know. I
don't want to believe they ever had anything. You know,
Aretha a lot of people she had words for, and
they were some of the funniest and best words ever
(09:57):
ever spoken by anyone. But she never had a Yeah,
the word frocks.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah, that word ruined forever.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Like beautiful, beautiful gowns, beautiful.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Gowns, the shadeath the Franklin could put into one noun
and like change the history of that.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Now, even someone calling someone else a queen of anything. Yeah,
But she she had nothing but respect for Carol King,
which I think is the highest amount of respect she
can get. Yes, absolutely, Franklin, Yes, respects.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
You never put the word queen in your album title.
She will find a way to defeat you whatever it takes.
But yet a beautiful moment and just the connection between them,
I mean, it's just really amazing. How and on Tapestry,
a classic album, you know, it wasn't the first time
she made an album. She did the Writer album than
the album with the group The City.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I really loved the Writer album.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's really really great. I know you love the City
album too.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, Like I love the Carol's Laurel Canyon years are
are just wow.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah yeah for such a quintessential like New York woman. Yeah,
like and Shan we went to LA because like Jerry Goffin,
like when the marriage like exploded and he was like, oh,
I'm going out to LA So she decided, well she
should move there too, so we could have contact with
his daughters. You know, wasn't her decision to go there,
(11:21):
and it wasn't like he ran the decision by her.
She made this decision unilaterally for the good of everybody else.
So very Carol King wait to do it. But the
way she found to thrive out there and to make Tapestry,
and the famous scene of like she's in the studio
making Tapestry, it's the same studio where Joni Mitchell is
down the hall making Blue at the same time, and
(11:41):
the carpenters are down in the third studio and they're
making an album that has rainy days and Mondays on it,
which is you know, that's that's the closest they got
to a Carol King or Joni Mitchell type of song,
and James Taylor is in his studio a block away,
so he's bopping over to play on Jonie's album and
Carol's album. And like you said, this community that just
thrives around the music.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, I mean, it's already incredibly lucky to find herself
in one great songwriter community. But Carol found herself in
two very exciting times in music. I mean going to
Laurel Kanyon in what was it nineteen sixty nine that
she moved there. Like if I could live anywhere at any point,
it would be nineteen sixty nine Laurel Canyon, Like it
would be like it would be that like hands down,
(12:23):
you know, like that was just I mean it was
like Joni and James and Carly and you know the
Crosby Stills, Nash and Young like it. It's all of
these incredible songwriters who would end up defining the next
you know, decade in a on of rock music, of
folk music. Is I mean, she found herself there and
found her voice, She found you know, her her singing voice,
(12:43):
her writing voice, you know, until this time again, like
she had been so much the composer to Jerry's words,
and so now this was kind of her finding that
voice in a multitude of ways.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Yeah, with this group.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Of people who were writing albums that would go on
to not only be successful and classic, but end up,
i mean, the most important influences on pop music.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Absolutely with Tapestry, where she is, you know, like you said,
already one of the biggest influences. And she's singing these
songs from her past, you know, in addition to like
all these like devastating new songs like It's Too Late
and so far Away, but she sings you make Me
Feel like a natural woman and will You Love Me Tomorrow?
(13:30):
And they're both. It's funny only in terms of time,
like just a few years past the original versions, but
you can hear that so much time is past. She's
been through so much since those songs were written. And
for people hearing Tapestry, it was the first time to
hear those songs and think, oh wow, this is the
woman who wrote these songs and who didn't have a
(13:51):
public voice until now.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
She's this great story that she tells about how she
was on stage with James Taylor and it was his show.
She was just his pian player. She was too shy,
she never wanted to sing in public, and James Taylor
just without warning her, just told the crowd, you know,
this is Carl King. She wrote all your favorite songs.
You don't know her name, but you know all her songs,
and now she's going to sing up on the roof
(14:14):
for you. And he did not clear that with her,
and she was forced to just sit there and sing
up on the roof in front of other people for
the first time in her life and found out that
she loved it. Yeah, and they loved it where she did,
but everybody loved it.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
I mean, I love her version of will You Love
Me Tomorrow on Tapestry, I mean just like I mean,
given the Joni Mitchell background vocals on that song, which
already going to win me over, but I mean just
kind of that slowed down sort of devastating, like really
pulling out the sadness in that song and the kind
(14:48):
of longing in that song. It does so much remind
me of that kind of the re recording of both
sides now that Jonie does right where like she like
revisits this song that she wrote in her youth as
an older woman looking back and kind of adds a
new meaning to it. I mean, like you said, it
wasn't that long in between, but still kind of feels
like a lifetime and feels like so much has passed
in between those two moments on like the Charrell's version
(15:12):
plus Carol's own take on it.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, yeah, and those are just you know, she learned
how to write songs by writing for other voices, So
she wrote all these songs with Goffin, with Tony Stern.
All these voices have heard themselves in these songs, and
so many amazing different, weird cover versions of all these
songs just people hearing them and saying, yeah, this is
(15:37):
my voice. And Carol King just writes in that way
that people just hear themselves in it. It's funny a
song that from Tapestry that stands out on the album
just because Tony Stern's lyric is very different. But where
you lead yeah and the Gilmore Girls, Yes, the song.
Carol King over the year, she talked about that song
and she thought it was outdating when they did it
(15:58):
on Tapestry, that it was you know that she thought
it was so subservient to the man in the song
and it does like it's really an outliar on the album.
There aren't any other songs that are just like you know,
I'll follow you around. And it was only years later
when it became the Gilmore Girls theme that Carol King
has always said, that's what she realized what the song
was always about, that it was always meant to be that,
(16:18):
and Tony Stern was like, yeah, let's redo this, Let's
make it the mother daughter song that was always meant
to be and sang it with Louise Goffin and for
her to take this song that was already out there
in the world and the song story changed just because
of the way people heard it. To me, that's a
beautiful tribute to Carol King as a songwriter that this
(16:40):
song could totally transform and we always think of it
as a mother daughter song now, Yeah, I mean, you know,
like that's really what.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
It was like.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
She said, that's what the song was always meant to be,
and took Gilmore Girls for her to hear that.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah, I think that's kind of the beauty of her
talent and her legacy. I mean, I guess maybe the
different that comes from her experience versus someone who starts
off as a performer write and starts off as like
someone whose songs they're writing for themselves, that they're performing.
Is that she has like this innate understanding of all
the possibilities a song can hold, Like she has this
sort of innate understanding of the idea that there is
(17:17):
so much beauty to someone else singing that song and
what they can curry to it, and that these versions
can coexist, and that it's meant to evolve, and it's
meant to change. It's meant to you know, turn into
and morph into so many things as it ages and
is allowed to exist in so many different formats. So
I think that's always been the beauty of watching kind
of Carol react and allow her songs to be used
(17:40):
in all these different ways and even rework them herself.
And like you mentioned with the Gilmore Girls version and
even just her own versions of will You Love Me
Tomorrow and her version of One Fine Day and you
know of you make you feel like a natural woman,
like she is not trying to take away from the
original versions of the song. She's like letting them kind
of grow and mutate as their too.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah, it's such a brilliant point that you make and
so crucial that she was a writer before she was
a performer or ever thought she'd be a performer. You know,
James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, they were singing in front
of people before they even wrote songs. They were entertaining
with the guitar. But she was a songwriter who commuted.
She took the subway into to write the songs and
(18:21):
would look at people and could walk around unnoticed like
a regular person. She's always told the story of the
song Beautiful and how she came up with the idea
for that song while she was writing the subway on
her way to work. You know, it's certainly not something
James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, like, they were so famous they
couldn't just you know, ride the subway and come up
with ideas for songs. But Carol King always had that
(18:42):
and never lost that.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah, I mean that's why the crazy stat I had
no idea was like the actual stat But I mean,
Tapestry was the for over forty years, kept the lexi
of being the best selling album by a solo female artist,
and it was only broken by Adele twenty one, which
is like insane that that was, like how long it
was able to happen. I mean, it's very clear just
(19:05):
because all these songs are such incredible classics. And again,
like talk to any I mean, we've interviewed so many
artists that I mean, I can't even count the amount
of times that Carol King has been brought up without
me having to bring her up, which I'm happy to do,
but you know, like the amount of times that it
comes up in no matter what age, what generation, where
they're from, Tapestry Carol, she is brought up constantly, and
(19:30):
I know you have the same. It was like exact
experience with so many artists you've spoken to.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
She's always the standard that you know a songwriter wants
to reach, whether that's Jonan and Paul McCartney in the
sixties or you know, like Adele and Taylor Swift, you know,
like the in the twenties. It's always that ideal of
like a songwriter who is very pop and very real
at the same time. I mean, I didn't know that
(19:54):
about how she held a record and a Dell broke
it and it's such a that's so perfect and simple.
You know, Adele would be the first one to say that.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Adel would probably I mean at twenty one is Tapestry. Yeah,
we are joined now by singer, songwriter, environmentalist, all around
legend Carol King. Thank you, thank you so much. We
are both so excited to have you on here.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Thank you. It's a pleasure to see you and talk
with you.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Before we get into some of the songs that we
talk about in this episode. I mean, you are, for
so many people a songwriting and composition blueprint. I'm curious
for you when you first started out and started exploring
that talent for yourself. Who were your blueprints and influences.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Well, my influence just go way back before there was
a Rolling Stone magazine, certainly before you guys, But my
earliest influences were Broadway. My mom, she loved theater and
she took me to Broadway shows. And I think my
all time favorite song is called Hello Young Lovers. It's
(21:06):
by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein the third The melody
is so simple, the chords are unexpected, and I love that.
I loved that so much that I tried to do
that in my whole songwriting career. And the lyric, I mean,
it's just such a simple, beautiful song. And any song
(21:29):
in West Side story. Those are some of my early influences,
you know. And then rock and Roll happened when I
was only thirteen, and I used to listen to Alan
Freed's show, and that was my first introduction to R
and B. And I loved the fusion between music from
the black community. I had never heard any of that.
(21:50):
I was like, whoa, and that was Alan Freed brought
that to my generation. So I was highly influenced by that.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
And how did you sort of begin to bridge the
those two parts of yourself, the influence from Broadway and
the influence of you know, people like Steven Sondheim with
rock and rolling, with R and B, how did you
kind of find a way to connect those Well.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
I was like a sponge. I would hear music and
I would take it in and incorporate it into my being.
And I have this gift of channeling it out and
being able to take it in and put it out.
And that's how I wrote songs as a melody writer.
(22:31):
I wasn't writing lyrics then, and the lyrics I wrote
when I first started out, before I met Jerry Goffin
were terrible, you know. They were like baby, baby, baby,
babysitting I'm a baby baby. It really is a gift
that I have to take in the kind of music
(22:51):
that I want to be writing. If I'm writing for
an artist, I put myself in the mind and the
vocal range. I just sort of get inside that artist,
and I'm able to write for an artist in that way.
I can still do that. I haven't been writing very
(23:12):
much lately, but I've had occasion to write a couple
of things, and it made me very happy to know
I can still do that. It's just part of my
being that I can do that, and I'm blessed and grateful.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Thank you. Those songs are part of our being. We
love to argue over our favorites because you've written so
many classics, in so many different styles and in so
many eras. Some of them songs that you sang, some
of them songs that other people saying. So we can
argue about our favorite Carol King songs forever. It's almost
difficult to even guess, like which ones are the ones
(23:47):
that are your favorites.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
You know, it's hard to have a favorite because there
are so many songs that I wrote that I really love,
and I'm really honored that you chose three of them
to be in your top five hundred, that's pretty amazing.
And there Will You Love Me Tomorrow? And a Natural
Woman and both of which Jerry wrote the lyric for,
(24:12):
and It's Too Late, which the lyric was written by Ms.
Tony Stern. But it's hard to pick a favorite because
it's like which is your favorite child? You know, I
have four children, and I don't have a favorite. I
love them all. Speaking of children, two of my children
are in the music business. One is Louise Goffin, who
(24:36):
is a songwriter in her own writer. And not only
is she's a songwriter, but she founded the Goffin King Foundation,
which is dedicated to empowering songwriters.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
She's a legend in her own right.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yeah, kind of, you know, But I wanted to mention
this songwriting because I think it's so amazing that she's
taken on this mission of sort of bringing it to
new generations and inspiring new generations of songwriters. Yeah. Lets
just check out the Goufin and King Foundation.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
And to speak to the songwriting legend of your daughter's parents,
I mean, I'm curious what the chemistry or working sort
of way that you and Jerry would write songs together.
Was it something where you know he would work on
a lyric first, or would you work on a composition first,
or would it be kind of simultaneous and kind of
at once where you would build a song like will
(25:32):
you Love Me Tomorrow? Together? Or you make Me feel
like a natural woman together?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
In that way, every song is different, even with the
same writer. For example, Tony Stern put the lyric to
It's too Late, She handed it to me. I put
it on the piano, on the typewritten page. You know,
on the piano. The music just came out of me.
And if you think about it, like if you just say,
(25:57):
stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time,
there's something wrong here. There can be no denying. You
can almost hear the music, or I could certainly just
by saying it as I'm playing the piano. The music
just came, and that that song got written with will
(26:18):
You Love Me Tomorrow? Again? I think Jerry wrote the
first verse first, and I don't remember if it happened
literally the way they depicted in the show. I don't
know if it was overnight or not. But I remember
seeing that first verse in his handwriting and the music
came and I remember thinking, this is a funny story.
(26:42):
I remember thinking when I was writing it, it kind
of almost sounded like a country song. But then, you know,
it turned out it wasn't for a number of reasons.
But I heard later in later years that the Cherelles
didn't want to do it because it sounded to country.
That's the thing that I've never put together. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
I mean there's also that those incredibly lush string arrangements
that I know that you arranged for that song. Can
you talk a little bit about kind of adding that
layer which makes it predecidedly kind of further away from
those sort of country influence roots from it.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Right. There was a hit then called there Goes My Baby,
which I think was Benny King's first hit as a
solo artist after the Drifters. He left the Drifters, and
that was I believe produced by lebre and Stoller, Jerry
Leeber and Mike Stoller, and they got an arranger and
(27:46):
again I think that was Stanley Applebaum, but it had
strings on it. Here's this great R and B singer singing,
you know, there goes my Baby, and you have timpany Oh,
you know these are orchestral instruments, and they are putting
it on a rhythm and blues song sung by a
(28:09):
black singer, and you know who sings from the church, right,
They've put it all together. And Jerry and I heard
that and we were floored. And I think that's what
made us decide to use strings on it. I don't
think that came from the producer. I think we wanted
to put strings on it.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yeah, he wrote so many great songs for the Cherells.
My personal favorite is what a sweet thing that was?
Like that song just destroys me. You have so many
songs like that that you wrote for those artists that
we think of as the girl group artists from that era,
that gave them this voice from your melodies.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Well, thank you. Yeah, that resonated. You know, first of all,
I'm a girl. But Jerry wrote the lyrics, and he
also wrote the lyrics I'm going to do what you
call segue. He wrote the lyrics to you make me
feel like a natural woman. He also wrote not with me,
saving all my love for you. So he seemed to
(29:11):
have that gift of getting inside the head of anybody
of any gender, of any you know age. He had
that same gift that I have for music that he
had for lyrics. And I don't know how we found
each other in the universe, but I'm really grateful that
we did.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
I mean, I've always been so in love with and
kind of obsessed with this community of songwriters that you
were part of in Laurel Canyon and as you were
working on your first two albums, finding James Taylor and
Joni Mitchell and of course Tony Stern, who who was
very instrumental in those first two albums. I'm curious kind of,
you know, thinking about you know, you and James and
(29:50):
Joni and how foundational those albums that you worked on
around then the songs that you've written. Could any of
you have imagined the kind of longevity and staying and
remaining influence and impact that the music you were writing
in Laurel Canyon and during that era would have.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
The answer is no, we didn't. We were too busy
being that community. That's true of the songwriter era in
New York. I was again, you know, I feel fortunate
to have met Jerry Goffin, and I was in the
right place at the right time for the birth of
rock and roll and the birth of the songwriter era.
(30:30):
There was a songwriter era before me, in the thirties
and forties. You know, you sort of visualize the music
publisher and the elevator, you know, and the songwriter saying, hey,
I got this great song, you know, in one of
the buildings, in the real building. That's a real thing.
But that predated when I was coming of age. And
(30:51):
so when I was coming of age, I literally could
walk into the office of Atlantic Records, which I think
was populated with Jerry Wexler, Armitt Erdigan, Armitt's brother, and
Miriam I forget her last name, who was their accountant.
So I could walk in and they had a piano,
(31:12):
and I could sit down and say, want to buy
a song? You can't do that anymore, But so that
was then, and again I didn't know I was part
of a thing, you know. And the same thing was
true in Laurel Canyon. When I moved out there, there
was a music business in California that was totally film oriented,
(31:36):
right because Hollywood and the music business in California before
that era was people writing songs for movies, right. And
then just before I got there, there started to be
record companies, little independent record companies like Liberty Records, and
(31:57):
I think that was Bobby Vee's label. And so when
I got out there, other people were coming there with
their guitars, and Peter Asher moved out there, and there
was this whole community in Crosby Stoles and Nash and
Jonie and Bonnie Raid and all the people that you
know were I don't know if she lived out there,
(32:19):
but she, you know, she was part of the people
that played at the Troubadour. And so that was another
thing that was being born, which is the music business
apart from films. And I was there for that too. Again,
like thank you, I had that gift that was able
(32:40):
to rise to the occasion. I also work hard, you know,
I did the work, but it's a coming of good
fortune and a gift.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
You've this great story in your book A Natural Woman,
which I love, where you're talking about singing when you
hadn't planned on singing in front of people that you
were just playing piano with James Taylor and he just
put you on the spot and made you sing a song.
And for you to go from a writer for other
artists to finding your own voice as a performer as
(33:10):
well as a writer that symbolized such a huge change
in terms of how people experience music to this day.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Yeah, it was. And I guess I don't consider myself
a great singer. I think I've learned how to be
a really good singer. I really do think I've learned
how to how to be that, and there are skills
like that you put to work in service of that.
But I am a channel, and I was, as a writer,
(33:38):
the vehicle to present the song to the publisher, to
the artist, to the arranger, and the transition to becoming
the person to present it to the world. James knew this,
That's why he put me on. Lou Adler knew this,
that's why he signed me. Other people who signed me
saw this. I never saw the connection that all I
(34:02):
had to do was be the same channel I was
in singing it for an artist or a producer or
an arranger or a band, and that's all I did.
But when I happened to do that on Tapestry, it
was the right thing, and people went, oh, this is authentic,
(34:23):
this is real, This is speaking to me from somebody
who's just like me. And that's I think that's how
the transition happened. But I never thought of myself. To me,
there was a barrier between me and an audience that
was any bigger than a room full of people who
(34:45):
I was playing a song for. And I learned from
James that there is no barrier.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Thank you so much, Carol, Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
I don't even know how to begin to thank you
for all the songs, Sweet Season maybe my favorite, like
so Far Away. These are deeply embedded in our lives.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
I appreciate that. And honestly, I hear from people all
the time, and people come up and they say this
when they'll name a song or their name tapestry and
they say that meant so much to me. And I
bet you've heard that a million times, and I've honestly
gotten to the place where I really know. But you're
(35:31):
telling me that for the first time, and so I'm
saying that to you. Thank you, I hear you, I
feel you, and I love you.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Thank you, Thank you so much, so much, Thank you
so much for listening to Rolling Stones five hundred great songs.
This podcast is brought to you by Rolling Stone and iHeartMedia.
Written and hosted by me, Rob Sheffield and Britney Spanos.
Executive produced by Gus Winner, Jason Fine, alex Dale and
Christian Horde, and produced by A Cannon, with music supervision
(36:02):
by Eric Zeiler.
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