The pivotal advice that transformed Carole King’s career: “Someone’s going to get heard”
When it comes to music, it’s never enough to get by on talent alone. Making it to the top requires bravery, confidence, and boldness. It requires an artist to put themselves out there time and time again, even in the face of rejection or even if they’re ignored or underestimated. In short, artistry has to go hand in hand with courage. Carole King learned that at a young age, and it never steered her wrong.
But really, King was always going to be brave. She was born with it in her blood as the daughter of a firefighter in New York City. Fear didn’t exist to him, so it didn’t really exist in her home. “I was never brought up to be fearful or think I couldn’t do anything, for any reason, but certainly not because I was a girl. It just was not part of my parents’ framework,” she said to the John F Kennedy Library.
While some people might think the best way to get a leg up in the industry is through parents who are also musicians, King saw the invaluable benefit of simply having parents who would be there for her. When she decided from a young age to pursue music, they didn’t discourage her dreams or worry that failure would hit. Instead, King remembered, “It was like, ‘Sure, you can do anything, and we will support you. We’re going to help you get there.'”
Their version of “we’re going to help get you there” looked slightly different, though. Even though she had no contacts in the industry, it turned out that the father who taught her to be so fearless would also be her key to the door. “My dad, being a firefighter, had that wonderful thing that comes along with all the problems being a firefighter, he had a badge that would get him in anywhere,” she remembered. “And one of the places I wanted him to get me in was to Alan Freed,” she continued, recalling her obsession with the American DJ who introduced her to a vast new world of music. “It was just an amazing thing to hear the music he played,” she explained, “because it wasn’t this sort of white-bread pop; it was rhythm and blues and very different and very visceral.”
So, with her father’s employee perks, she got in the room with Freed and even spoke to him, giving her one of the best pieces of advice she’d ever received. “Alan Freed gave this girl some advice,” she remembered. “He said, ‘Well, if you want to get your songs heard, just go pick up the phone book and look up record companies and start calling and see if you can get in to see some of the people.’ And that’s what I did.”
King always had the confidence needed to be a great artist. She seemed always to know that it wasn’t just what she wanted to do; it was what she had to do. Her issue was simply how to get people to pay attention. She said, “It wasn’t the question of whether I could write songs; it was the question of whether anyone would care. So when I was younger, I think the age I set forth on the journey to have people listen to my songs, I was probably 14, 15.”
But with Freed’s advice now in her pocket, it felt like she’d cracked the code to finally get through to the people in power—simply by calling them up and asking to be put through. “So I look in the phone book, and the first one—I’m in the As—Atlantic Records. Jerry Wexler,” she continued. “Well, it was very new then. It was newly founded; it was only in one room then.”
But King didn’t just stop at calling. Once she knew the address, she decided to just turn up and chance it. “I walked in off the street. I couldn’t get an appointment. I just walked in off the street, and my whole attitude was, ‘Someone’s going to get heard, why not me?’”
When she landed in Atlantic’s office, with the perfect and necessary mix of talent and guts, the fates aligned for King. “They listened,” she said simply, expressing that the rest was history. Off the back of that meeting, King started building contacts that allowed her to eventually break through, first as a songwriter for other artists and then as a musician in her own right. By the 1980s, she was one of the biggest names around when she walked back through the Atlantic doors and finally signed a record deal with them.
