The 1962 song that rendered Carole King speechless: “We were stunned into silence”
We’ve all had that moment when you hear a song for the first time that’s so powerful, so magnetic, so intriguing, that it completely stops you in your tracks. In the case of Carole King, it almost made her crash her car.
For someone like her, you could imagine that while she thankfully wasn’t causing pile-ups on the highway, the feeling of having her world completely changed was a semi-regular occurrence, particularly back in the days when her most prolific songwriting peak was at its prime; then again, the command of Dionne Warwick could do that to anyone.
It was 1962, a year in which the ‘60s had not quite become what the decade would later be considered so iconic for. In this sense, there was an energy in the air that anything could still be possible, and music could travel in any given direction. For King’s part, she was only just getting started as a writer and musician.
Similarly, in Warwick’s world, she had just released her first solo single, ‘Don’t Make Me Over’. In an instant, it was clear that the landscape had changed with the arrival of this startling new voice, and people couldn’t resist being immediately pulled in by it. King, with her husband and then songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, was in their car.
As King herself later recalled, the couple were “driving up the Garden State Parkway when we heard Dionne Warwick’s recording of ‘Don’t Make Me Over’ for the first time. We were stunned into silence”. Who wouldn’t be, with those soaring strings deftly flying over the top of Warwick’s vocals felt deep within the soul?
“If we hadn’t been in the left lane between exits, it would have been a pull-over-to-the-side-of-the-road moment,” King emphatically stated, “When the song was over, I exclaimed: ‘What was that?’ By ‘that’ I meant the time signature changes, the instrumentation, and the unpredictable chords that allowed the melody to flow over them and carry the power of Warwick’s performance downstream.”
She was bang on the money; there was no other way to describe such a powerhouse of a song other than a total tidal way of unbridled emotion and sincerity. But naturally, they were budding songwriters hearing a masterpiece. They had to work out how they were going to replicate it in their own distinct way.
None of that is intended to discredit Warwick, but when King said “Gerry turned off the radio,” she knew exactly what he was doing. His mind was racing, alive with electric ideas that would see them become the next Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the songwriting genius team behind ‘Don’t Make Me Over’.
In so many ways, they more than fulfilled that ambition. You could cite many such examples, but looking at classics like ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’, you could see exactly where the stirring influence of Warwick’s original genesis lay. For a moment, while King was rendered speechless, it also handed her the key to the rest of her life.
