‘It’s Too Late’ and the best opening lyric that Carole King ever wrote
Those paying close attention to the new generation of pop artists will probably know just how powerful Carole King continues to be.
She might not come up as often as other names, but her material, especially Tapestry, continues to shape some of the biggest names in the industry. “Carole is, as far as songwriting goes, also alongside Patsy Cline in one of the first artists that my mom introduced me to,” Sabrina Carpenter shared during her recent Nardwuar interview. “Tapestry is just one of the greatest albums of all time.”
Her timeless melodies and lessons in romantic hardships are also reasons why artists like Carpenter continue to revisit her tracks and cover them themselves in new and interesting ways. Even the simplicity of lyrics like King’s contemplative reflections in ‘It’s Too Late’, in which she sings, “It’s too late, baby, now it’s too late,” holds more weight because they’re also direct, taking something universal but talking about it with precision.
It’s a balance many try and fail to capture nowadays. Often, when an artist tries to become too timeless, they end up with vague lyrics that fail to land anywhere meaningful. And when they opt for over-precision, songs can become dated quickly, falling flat before they’ve even fully taken off. But with writers like King, you never really had to worry about any of that, because she already knew just which strings to pull to make things withstand the test of time.
It’s also the reason why many of her songs can be analysed any which way. Once again, ‘It’s Too Late’ provided a good example of this, with words ambiguous enough to be personal but specific enough to be societal, commenting on the way of the world and how it’s time to say goodbye to how things were. Things have changed, she tells us, and “it’s too late” to go back and do anything about it.
The song itself was written as a breakup song, but this sense of despair and malaise also bled over into the broader cultural spirit, and how the end of the 1960s and its political climate made an entire generation feel scorned and directionless. Although not written that way, it carries through the ages, peering through the veil of modern society with the same sense of aimless melancholy about not being able to change the nature of things.
It’s also why the first line is incidentally the best King ever wrote, anchoring both the dire nature of the world or a specific circumstance and the human tendency to wallow in the crux of it all: “Stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time / There’s something wrong here, there can be no denying / One of us is changing / Or maybe we just stopped trying.”
The last part, in particular, is indicative of the pinnacle of King’s songwriting prowess. Nothing in King’s world is ever one-dimensional, and even looking at something as literal as a breakup is often the prerequisite to complicated feelings after the fact. She talks about how change brings about laziness, but how the cyclical nature of freezing up in the face of change can also make it all the worse.
It’s powerful without applying blame anywhere specific, which is also probably why it still sticks. King is the master of writing from the heart in a way that anybody can relate to. But she’s also the master of taking something simple and presenting it in a more thought-provoking way, like looking at the world and then in the mirror and thinking, ‘Am I the problem?’
