The one album that completely blew Carole King away: “Amazing vocal chops”
The entire mission behind every Carole King song is to make someone feel a shred of the heartache that she felt.
Not every one of her songs was meant to be an emotional wrecking ball, but when listening to some of her best material, you would swear that she had lived through every single hardship that anyone would have ever had to face. But after being one of the biggest songwriters of her generation, she wasn’t prone to having someone else make a record that knocked her on her ass.
After all, King has remained one of the most impressively humble artists of her generation. She might have needed to go through a lot of nerves to step out onstage for the first time with James Taylor, but when listening to some of her greatest hits, you could tell that she got a lot of her strength from channelling all of her emotion into her work. It doesn’t get much better than being one of the inspirations for The Beatles, but the singer-songwriter scene was about to get much more interesting as the 1960s opened up.
While many of the greatest artists of the Woodstock generation may have followed in Bob Dylan’s footsteps, there was a lot more going on beyond the traditional cowboy chords. Crosby, Stills, and Nash had already shown everyone what was possible when they made their first records, but even compared to their soaring harmonies, there was no one on this Earth that was operating on the same level as Joni Mitchell.
She may have been known for making a few catchy tunes like ‘Both Sides Now’ and ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, but if you looked under the hood of any of her tunes, that was a lot more going on. She was looking to build musical tapestries in the same way that King had only suggested on her breakthrough album, but if King was inhabiting songs that she wrote for other people, no one else could have possibly sung Blue the same way that Mitchell could whenever she walked into the studio.
She was clearly recovering from a broken heart, but Blue is one of the few records that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. Mitchell was hurting with every single line she sang, and even if there were brief moments of respite, like on the classic ‘River’, you can still feel her loneliness in every single line, as she waits for any way to escape her broken heart.
King may not have experienced everything that Mitchell did firsthand, but she had to marvel at the pure craft that she put into every one of those songs, saying, “When [Blue] was released in 1971, I was blown away by Joni’s open guitar tunings, unpredictable chord changes and amazing vocal chops that allowed her to move effortlessly from warm, rich low notes to bell-like high notes and back again.”
It’s easy to look at those gorgeous guitar tunings, but King’s praise of Mitchell’s vocal chops is often far too neglected when talking about her career. She may have the kind of range that any folk singer could have hoped for, but these songs demanded more than a decent vocal performance. It involved being a sonic actor of sorts, and Mitchell didn’t need to do a lot of preparation for the role since she had been playing out every single scene for most of her life.
King clearly had a legacy already built for herself, but this album alone proved that she had some competition for the best female songwriter of her generation. But Mitchell never thought about it as a competition. It was about making the best music that would make people want to dance, laugh, or cry depending on what the singer was going through.
