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Fact #148402

When:

Short story:

Ode Records releases Tapestry, Carole King’s second album as a solo vocalist.

Full article:

TAPESTRY BY CAROLE KING
by Johnny Black

Tapestry established Carole King as the first superstar female singer-songwriter. Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian, Laura Nyro and others had preceded her and blazed a trail, but none had achieved the kind of sales figures and chart accomplishments of Tapestry.

Since starting work in the music business in 1959, King had composed over 100 Top 40 hits, including eight No1 singles, with her Brill Building lyric-writing husband Gerry Goffin, but she was not regarded as a singer-songwriter, because those songs had been written for other artists including Little Eva, The Drifters and The Monkees.

Encouraged by her friend James Taylor, King had taken her first step as a solo songwriter in 1970 with the album Writer, but only because the success of The Beatles and Bob Dylan had encouraged so many artists to write their own songs that she was finding it hard to make a living. Writer sold a miserable 6,000 copies, but with Tapestry, recorded at A&M Studios in Hollywood, the decision to make a stripped back, piano-based album that sounded like her demos for other artists, proved absolutely right for the time.

Listeners weary of the excesses of psychedelia and prog-rock, were attracted to the clarity and directness of her melodies. Furthermore, in her lyrics they heard comforting echoes of their own thoughts about love and life in the early 70s.

Will You Love Me Tomorrow, written for The Shirelles a full decade earlier, was miraculously transformed by King’s new treatment. The girl group version had seemed fraught with all the insecurities and double-standards of the traditional boy-girl relationships of that earlier era, whereas King’s own version comes across as a mature, clear-headed appraisal of the uncertainties of any relationship in any era. Her determination to survive and move on from a failed relationship in It’s Too Late, and her promise of life-long loyalty in You’ve Got A Friend were philosophical touchstones for a newly liberated sisterhood of women.

Even so, King never sought to ingratiate herself with the hardline feminists. She was a model of the new woman – hard-working, financially independent, the equal of any man she encountered in the music business – but she took her role as a mother as seriously as her career, she frequently stated that she had never encountered sexual discrimination in her working life, and she was happy to acknowledge that she had called the album after a piece of tapestry she had been working on as relaxation between takes.

On June 19, 1971, Tapestry hit No1 on the Billboard albums chart for the first of a staggering fifteen weeks on its way to notching up 10m sales in two years. At the Grammys King collected Best Album, Best Song, Best Record and Best Female Vocalist, and the album went on to spend 302 weeks on the charts, securing it the distinction of being the longest-charting album ever by a female solo artist.

In short, Tapestry’s achievements paved the way for every Tori Amos, Alanis Morrisette and Avril Lavigne who has followed in its wake.

(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Books, 2007)

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Although frequently huzzahed as a feminist rock pioneer, King was beaten to the punch on every vital issue from liberation to racism, the ecology and beyond by Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian and Grace Slick. What she had that they lacked, however, was over a decade’s worth of song-crafting smarts. With 100-plus Top 40 hits to her credit as a Brill Building tunesmith, she knew precisely how to shape a melody, construct a killer chorus, add light and shade and, ultimately, pass off Tapestry’s comfortingly romanticised domestic doormat dramas as emancipation anthems. Lyrics like “Where you lead I will follow,” are bosom buddies with Stand By Your Man but, sung by Carole King, they still unerringly pluck the heartstrings of any sentimental fool within earshot.
Johnny Black (review first appeared in Mojo magazine, 2006)