CAROLE KING'S sophomore release, 1971's 'Tapestry' is simply one of those perennials that has endured over the years. A landmark singer/ songwriter release which inadvertently helped to establish the genre before anyone even used such terminology, it's one of those hallowed releases which has withstood the vagaries of fashion and sold a whopping 24 million copies along the way.
Of course, we shouldn't measure success simply in terms of sales, because these things can fall either way. Yes, 'Tapestry' joins Neil Young's pastoral classic 'Harvest' as a record which dominated the album charts for years (literally, as it featured on the Billboard charts for a staggering six years), but then you could say the same for Meat Loaf's dreaded 'Bat Out Of Hell', which to these ears has always sounded like the worst kind of AOR aberration regardless of how many record company execs it may have bought Bel Air mansions for.
Fortunately, 'Tapestry' does reek strongly of that indefinable je ne sais quoi that marks certain albums out from the herd, and – a remarkable 50 years after her emergence as a songwriter – does Carole King all the credit in the world. She'd established herself as a force to be reckoned with prior to its' release as half of the husband and wife Goffin-King songwriting partnership (if you're aware of songs like The Monkees' 'Pleasant Valley Sunday' and 'Goin' Back” as covered by everyone from The Byrds to The Pretenders, then she's impinged on your world already) but by the latter half of the 1960s, she was outgrowing her Brill Building days and proving herself capable of competing as a solo artist in her own right.
So, now we're presented with this lavish, 2CD Legacy Edition of 'Tapestry', this is as good a time as any to re-discover what made 'Tapestry' great in the first place. Sure, to an America reeling from the horrors of Vietnam, the idea of a gutsily melodic Brooklyn girl singing songs of love, defiance and the comforts of home such as 'So Far Away' (“Long ago I reached for you and there you stood/ holding you again could only do me good”) and 'Where You Lead' (“and where you lead, I will follow/ anywhere that you tell me to”) must have been both timely and attractive, but it's a testament to King's skill as a composer and wordsmith that these songs remain full of presence even in the context of a different time.
Of course it also helped that King had a solidly inventive team around her. Producer Lou Adler knew a thing or three about the sound he wanted for 'Tapestry' and surrounding Carole with sympathetic cohorts like guitarist Danny Korthchmar, drummer Russ Kunkel and talented sessioneers like Curtis Amy (sax/ flute) he created a sound that was relatively sparse and almost demo-ey in places, always allowing plenty of space for King's graceful piano and commanding vocal. Parts of it may rock harder than you remember (the fulsome boogie of 'Smackwater Jack', the nicely suggestive opener 'I Feel The Earth Move') but mostly it's the ballads that still form the heart of the record. And, unless you've spent the last few decades hiding under a rock, you don't need me to introduce you to the tremulous caress of 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow?', the straight-from-the-soul delights of '(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman' or the inevitable, James Taylor-assisted 'You've Got A Friend', which everyone and their terrapin still cover to this day.
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The real find for long-term admirers, though, comes courtesy of the bonus second disc, an in-concert affair featuring just King alone at the piano at a variety of American venues during the '70s and feeling every nuance of these intensely personal songs. Her playing is wonderfully fluid and the stripped-down aspect ensures that songs like 'So Far Away' and 'It's Too Late' simply ache with longing from start to finish. As you might imagine, the crowd are going nuts even as she negotiates the intro to 'You've Got A Friend', and she draws 'em out by hanging on and scatting at the end, but this success is matched by an especially perky 'Beautiful' and a gasoline-pumping 'I Feel The Earth Move', which are the very essence of 'celebratory' in this context.
OK, so hindsight has ensured that this album has been hailed as an Adult-Oriented Rock classic, but while that term is enough to strike fear into any self-respecting music fan's heart, the reality is considerably kinder, for 'Tapestry' is not only good enough to be viewed as the album that launched a thousand superior female singer-songwriters, but it's still capable of weaving itself into the hearts of a whole new generation. Don't be afraid to succumb.
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