The 1970 album Carole King called the perfect complement to ‘Tapestry’
If you were to ask Carole King, it’s likely that she’d credit a significant chunk of her success to her early musical partner in crime, James Taylor.
Before she became a well-known name in her own right, King was already penning hits for some of the industry’s biggest names, including Dusty Springfield, The Monkees, Burt Bacharach, and, of course, The Shirelles, with her timeless hit ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’.
However, while she was no doubt a more-than-capable songwriter, Taylor felt she had a large amount of untapped potential, and felt like he was sitting and observing while she wasted that potential, simply because she felt like she didn’t have what it took to be a singer, without the ability to occupy a position front and centre of her own artistic offering.
When Taylor finally urged her to stand out on her own, it came at a good time, as King had recently split from her then-husband, Gerry Goffin, and she was also in desperate need of some sort of career shake-up, which Taylor saw as the perfect opportunity. After all, many writers were taking the plunge and becoming singer-songwriters, and Taylor knew that, had King only given it a go, she’d likely become one of the forerunners of the entire movement.
And he was right. While Writer wasn’t exactly the sort of eye-opening, commercial splash he’d envisioned, the following record, Tapestry, certainly was. As King’s career-defining masterpiece, Tapestry embodied everything Taylor saw in King, allowing her the space to flex her true musical capabilities and establish herself as a fully-formed musician in her own right.
While scary at first, Taylor’s encouragement to “go out there, be yourself, [and] sing your songs” was all she needed to know that it was worth it, his presence a natural remedy for any or all anxieties she’d been experiencing at the time. This was also, of course, partially due to the fact that Taylor had been in her orbit for a while, which meant that, when it came to the pair recording his Sweet Baby James at the same time as Tapestry, the entire process felt as organic as it possibly could.
Their overlap was likely another thing that helped to put King at ease, making it feel as though her embarking on her own record wasn’t too intense an endeavour or too much of a struggle to execute, because she had Taylor there to soften the fear of everything going wrong – as she put it herself, it felt like Taylor’s record “flowed over to Tapestry”, making it seem like they were “one continuous album” in her mind.
You can hear these similarities when you listen to both records back-to-back – both in sound, style, and general atmosphere, the two records feel like two pieces of a whole, and companion pieces that perfectly embody the true spirit of the early 1970s singer-songwriter movement.
And because King was already primed for whatever Tapestry would become, she showed countless others precisely how it was done, inspiring entire generations to put pen to paper and pour their heart and soul into timeless art.
As Taylor once said of her craft, “She started writing by herself, about herself – that is to say, from her own life. It came out of her so strong, so fierce and fresh. So clearly in her own voice. And yet, so immediately accessible, so familiar: you knew these songs already.”
