A playlist of every Carole King song that charted in the top 100
If you ask Carole King, she will likely tell you she owes a significant amount of her success to James Taylor. While her break from Gerry Goffin marked a pivotal moment for her artistically, she always had it; others just provided the support and tools for her to go the extra mile. As Taylor once told her: “All you have to do is go out there, be yourself, sing your songs, and everything will be fine.”
After severing ties with Goffin, King would finally take better control of her own creative venture with less restraint than ever before. Her debut, Writer, enjoyed modest success upon release, setting the scene for what was to come. Then, Tapestry saw her transition from a singer to a well-rounded musician, with songs that became standards that are still widely recognised today.
Pinpointing King’s most notable tracks is easy, but more difficult is explaining her allure: rather than pinning words like “effortless” and “sultry” to her vocals, it’s likely more visceral and elegant to compare her to the things and experiences that actually are those things, even if it seems cliché. Her words carry stories, but her voice delivers the weight with a smoothness akin to feeling sand beneath your bare feet.
Her words, even when they aren’t her own, are always delivered with layers of emotion and the courage of someone who knew exactly how to do it. ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’, for instance, carries both the promise of love while delivering an undertone of paranoia-infused romance. It’s uncertain but transient, taking the song to new depths previously unheard in the ethereal original by The Shirelles.
‘You’ve Got A Friend’ holds a similar appeal: creating a unique space where beauty and melancholy collide. “The song was as close to pure inspiration as I’ve ever experienced. The song wrote itself. It was written by something outside myself, through me,” King once said. Perhaps the reason why it came so naturally was its universal appeal—of finding comfort and solace in others throughout all of life’s challenges.
Most intriguingly, the more you delve into King’s messages, the more you realise it doesn’t matter at all whether you connect to its initial inspiration or not. The power is in the feeling and what it all means as a listener as you allow yourself to be taken along the musical journey, the uncertainty of not knowing where you might end up providing something riveting that only true artists can offer.
For many musicians, chart performance is a key indicator of success, but it’s likely that King would have still been hailed as the forerunner of the singer-songwriter movement even if she hadn’t gained mainstream appeal. During a time when the capitalist regime was increasingly becoming a feared unknown in the music industry, King brought realism and confessionalism, setting herself and her talent apart from the rest of the “pretentious arseholes”, as John Lydon once appropriately put it.
Still, King’s chart performance is monumental, with over 100 songs entering the top 100. The list below only includes 84 songs because some of the songs have been charted multiple times by different artists, constituting a total of 118.
The Carole King songs that entered the top 100:
- ‘Been to Canaan’
- ‘Believe in Humanity’
- ‘City Streets’
- ‘Corazon’
- ‘Hard Rock Cafe’
- ‘He’s a Bad Boy’
- ‘High Out of Time’
- ‘I Feel the Earth Move’
- ‘It Might As Well Rain Until September’
- ‘It’s Too Late’
- ‘Jazzman’
- ‘Morning Sun’
- ‘Nightingale’
- ‘Now and Forever’
- ‘One Fine Day’
- ‘One To One’
- ‘Only Love Is Real’
- ‘School Bells Are Ringing’
- ‘Simple Things’
- ‘So Far Away’
- ‘Sweet Seasons’
- ‘You Light Up My Life’
- ‘You’ve Got a Friend’
- ‘After All This Time’
- ‘At the Club’
- ‘Chains’
- ‘Crying in the Rain’
- ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’
- ‘Don’t Ever Change’
- ‘Don’t Forget About Me’
- ‘Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad About My Baby’
- ‘Every Breath I Take’
- ‘Everybody Go Home’
- ‘Go Away, Little Girl’
- ‘Goin’ Back’
- ‘Halfway to Paradise’
- ‘Happy Times Are Here to Stay’
- ‘He Knows I Love Him Too Much’
- ‘He’s in Town’
- ‘Her Royal Majesty’
- ‘Hey Girl’
- ‘Hi-De-Ho’
- ‘Home Again’
- ‘How Many Tears’
- ‘Hung on You’
- ‘I Can’t Hear You’
- ‘I Can’t Make It Alone’
- ‘I Can’t Stay Mad At You’
- ‘I Can’t Stop Talking About You’
- ‘I Just Can’t Say Goodbye’
- ‘I Need You’
- ‘I Want to Stay Here’
- ‘I’d Never Find Another You’
- ‘I’m Into Something Good’
- ‘I’ve Got Bonnie’
- ‘Is This What I Get for Loving You’
- ‘It’s Going to Take Some Time’
- ‘It’s Too Late’
- ‘Keep Your Hands Off My Baby’
- ‘Let’s Turkey Trot’
- ‘Loco-Motion’
- ‘My One True Friend’
- ‘A Natural Woman’
- ‘No Sad Song’
- ‘Oh No, Not My Baby’
- ‘Old Smokey Locomotion’
- ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’
- ‘Point of No Return’
- ‘Porpoise Song (the)’
- ‘Run to Him’
- ‘Sharing You’
- ‘So Far Away’
- ‘So Much Love’
- ‘Some of Your Lovin”
- ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’
- ‘Time Don’t Run Out on Me’
- ‘Up on the Roof’
- ‘Walk On In’
- ‘Wasn’t Born to Follow’
- ‘When My Little Girl Is Smiling’
- ‘Where You Lead’
- ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’
- ‘Yours Until Tomorrow’
