I recently hosted a dinner party at my house. Normally for me, half the fun of throwing a party is getting to create the playlist. But since my partner wasn’t in town and couldn’t help with the bar tending or menu development, I didn’t have much time to actually put together the musical ambience for the night.
Instead, I thought I’d just focus on my record collection. Again, under normal circumstances, I probably would have pre-selected a few albums to play over the course of the evening. Instead, I just let people explore the collection and pick whatever they were drawn to once an album ran its course.
I will not go into depth about the conversation that led me to put on Tapestry by Carole King. It was a series of thoughts stemming from VBS, Boygenius, Taylor Swift, and Joni Mitchell. If you know me well enough, you can probably fill in the gaps.
But we landed on Carole King, and specifically Tapestry. So, when the next musical pause came, I found the record and let the needle drop.
I do not remember specifically when I bought this record, but it still has a price tag from Rasputin’s, marked for $1.95, which means I likely picked it up sometime in college. $1.95 seems like a steal, even for the 15 or so years ago when I bought it.
I cannot overstate Carole King’s impact on pop music. In fact, I did a quick Wikipedia search just to confirm some of her songs, and even I was blown away by her actual songwriting credits. King started songwriting professionally when she was 17. Since then, she’s written songs such as Chains, The Loco-Motion, Take Good Care of My Baby, Up on the Roof, One Fine Day, I’m into Something Good, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, and of course (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.
But King didn’t record her own music until the 70s. Tapestry is her second album, released in 1971 and includes King’s versions of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, as well many of her now iconic songs (It’s Too Late, Where You Lead, etc.). Tapestry was a success and spent 15 consecutive weeks at number one on the US Billboard 200 and nearly six years charting the Billboard 200.
And it’s no wonder that I feel like most people have some kind of special memory with this album, or King’s music in general. These songs were something I grew up listening to, my mom singing along. This feels like a nearly universal experience.
I’ve been thinking a lot about musical history and tradition, and how music gets shared and passed down generationally. Perhaps it’s easier now to get siloed into one particular genre or era of music, with little consideration for where it stems from–to never really know the roots or history, the inspiration for your favorite artists. And when you’re young, you assume that something you heard or discovered must be the first of its kind, or even that an artist who started 15 years ago is foundational.
But there is no female singer-songwriter who doesn’t owe her career to and who wasn’t influenced, either outright or inadvertently, by Carol King. And her music itself is still meaningful, still resonates across that generational divide. Just a girl and her piano, singing her song.
For a bit of some weird life coincidences, the same week I started writing this, I watched the movie Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, which as it turns out is directed by Lou Adler. When I to do some more research about Tapestry, I discovered that this record was produced by Lou Adler. In fact, there is a scene in the movie where the aunt and her friend shush the proto-punk rock girl to turn up the radio and sing along to King’s Will You Love Me Tomorrow, which was released on Tapestry. I told you, this was a near universal experience.
For my cat friends, here’s a cute little piece of trivia. The album cover shows King sitting on a bench beside a window, holding a tapestry hand-stitched by herself, with her cat, named Telemachus.