“Oh my God”: the singer Carole King said perfected her song
It’s rather apt that Carole King wrote and gifted a song called ‘You’ve Got A Friend’, because she was perhaps the most caring and generous artist in all of music.
Before she released that track on her own seminal album, 1971’s Tapestry, King was quietly toiling away in the background of contemporary 1960s pop, writing hits for other artists. She wasn’t necessarily allured by the limelight offered to some of the stars she was writing for at the time and so continued to gift some of her greatest hits to the biggest names, knowing that a different approach to her music doesn’t always make a bad one.
A point displayed best in another song she put on Tapestry, ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’. When finally released on her own album, King displayed it as a sort of softly delivered ballad, which contrasted the powerful performance of Aretha Franklin, who ultimately made the song so universally known.
But King was selfless enough to know that Franklin’s voice could do something hers can’t, and so in gifting her the song, she gave it a chance to take on new, transcendent realms. The story was no different for ‘You’ve Got A Friend’, which, for a short while, was a King staple on the live circuit.
The eventual beneficiary, James Taylor, remembers watching King play the song in the iconic LA venue, The Troubadour, where he marvelled at just how brilliant a record it was. He said, “As soon as I heard it, I said, ‘Man, that’s just, that’s just it! That’s a great, great song.’”
He added that after a few creative studio sessions together, King did the unthinkable and said ‘How about this one?’ to the song he had previously been marvelling at. He recalled to King, “You were generous enough to give this fantastic tune that she’s recording herself, and she allows me to have the first shot at it.”
But what made King such a great songwriter and collaborator was that she was a fan more than anything. A true servant to music, her sole aim was to create the most magical artistic moment she could possibly manage, and the rest would fall into place. So she had no problems confessing to Taylor, “Hearing your rendition of it for the first time, it was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s perfect!’”
The pair then recalled the night they banded back down to the Troubadour, to play a version of the song that combines both of their styles and provides a one-off musical moment that only the members of that lucky crowd were able to enjoy.
King recalled, “It was basically your arrangement, pretty much, which is not that different from mine, except my piano, I had to change some of the chords to meet your arrangement.”
She continued, concluding, “But it was perfect, perfect, I wanted to do that. But the way your guitar blends with my piano part is just, it’s like that first time we played together.”
