1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 206. Carole King – Tapestry (1971)

 

Having written or co-written many songs already featured here, King steps out from behind the curtain and performs some of her songs herself. This is almost like a Carole King’s Greatest Hits, not only featuring some of her biggest solo songs like I Feel The Earth Move and It’s Too Late, but also some of her biggest hits recorded by other artists especially Will You Love Me Tomorrow, originally recorded by the Shirelles in 1961. I did the maths, and by my reckoning King wrote this when she was 19 years old – her version on here is a slow and vulnerable version that is a beautiful piece of music. Also on here, and the only other composition with Gerry Goffin, is You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman, as seen in this list previously by Aretha Franklin. Is King’s stripped-down piano version better than Franklin’s? For me, probably on a par, at least.

And perhaps because she has written so much for so many other people, it’s quite easy to imagine the tracks on this album done by somebody else – Karen Carpenter singing So Far Away for example, or James Taylor singing Home Again. This is perhaps not surprising since Taylor did do a cover of You’ve Got A Friend. 

In some ways, for me, because it’s one of those albums where a lot of the tracks get a lot of airplay, it wasn’t a surprise or especially exciting, but the act of deliberately and closely listening to it gave me more appreciation of King not only as a songwriter but also as a performer in her own right. I refer back to my side notes for Janis Joplin’s Pearl, however, about female vocalists mostly only being allowed to sing about relationships – but then there’s Smackwater Jack, a bluesy number about a man going on a killing spree, and the title track Tapestry (which I could hear Kate Rusby covering) which has a fairy-tale quality, about a wandering man trying to find the indefinable. 

I’m not even sure what musical genre to call this album. Wikipedia classes the album as “soft rock/pop”, which is another way of saying “radio friendly”. Some are a little bit R&B, some a little bit country, but none use any of the specific elements that really define these kinds of music. They’re just plain old good tunes, perhaps closer to the “Great American Songbook” kind of style. And that, perhaps, is another secret to King’s success. Just as I can picture some of the artists who have already recorded her songs singing the ones on this album, they are the kind of music that any artist could pick up and interpret – somebody more current like Adele, or Guy Garvey, or RAYE, or Sam Smith for example could easily grab one of these and cover it and, in the words of X-Factor judges, "make it their own". Perhaps one or more of them already have.