‘Why immerse yourself in the darkness?’ How Carole King confronted a life of abuse to make Tapestry 

The sky was blue, the breeze was cool, the Hollywood Hills twinkled in the sun. And as she sped towards Laurel Canyon with the roof down, 26-year-old Carole King could feel life hurtling forward to met her at a headlong pace. 

“I turned right onto Laurel Canyon and revelled in the rush of wind blowing through my hair,” the singer-songwriter would write of her first experiences of LA in her 2012 memoir, A Natural Woman. “Other drivers were cruising up and down the canyon without a specific destination. I was going to the West Coast office of Columbia Music.”

It was 1968 and the artist born Carol Joan Klein, to a teacher and firefighter from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, was newly arrived in rock'n'roll’s hippy heartland. Behind her in New York she had left a decade worth of hits penned for other artists and a failed marriage to a serial philanderer and LSD addict. 

King was about to take biggest leap of her life, walking away from a steady career as songwriter for hire to make a stab at stardom in her own right. And in February 1971 – 50 years ago this week and three years after that revelatory drive though Laurel Canyon – those dreams bore fruit. Tapestry, her second solo record, would sell 25 million copies and become a defining album of the Seventies. Just as importantly it was one of the first LPs to put the female experience, raw and unapologetic, front and centre.

Tapestry contained it its DNA the blueprint for generations of confessional rock to follow. It paved the way for artists such as Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette, Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers. They didn’t always sound like Carole King. Nonetheless, they were hugely in her debt. 

Yet the remarkable confidence with which Tapestry announced itself with opening track I Feel the Earth Move told only part of the story. King may have appeared ready to conquer the world. In reality, she was hugely self-effacing and never comfortable as centre of attention. The irrepressible, strident Tapestry was the sound of someone finding their way in the world. 

“People often ask if I knew, when I was recording Tapestry, that it would become one of the biggest-selling albums in popular music, or that it would touch so many people,” King would explain in A Natural Woman. “How could I know that? I was simply doing what I’d always done – recording songs that I had written or cowritten.”

Writing songs was all she had known since she was 15. At that age, she strode unannounced into the Times Square offices of ABC Paramount Records and landed a contract. 

“You could walk in. They had a piano in the room,” is how she described the New York songwriting scene of the late Fifties. “You’d play. They’d go, ‘that’s great kid. I’ll take that song. Here’s 25 dollars’.”

Yet for all her prodigiousness and drive, King – who anglicised her name from the Jewish Klein to blend in – lacked faith in her abilities. In particular, she was hugely self-conscious about her lyrics. 

Enter Gerry Goffin, a budding songwriter from Queens with whom she soon struck up a partnership. He wrote the words, she sprinkled the fairy dust in with her music. 

They also became a couple and, when she fell pregnant, married. He was 20, she 17. Still, their youth was not an impediment as they churned out smashes such as Will You Love Me Tomorrow (for the Shirelles), I’m Into Something Good (Herman’s Hermits) and Dusty Springfield’s Goin’ Back (King burst into tears when she heard Springfield sing it for the first time). 

“Every day we squeezed into our respective cubbyholes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky,” King would say in Simon Frith’s book The Sociology of Rock. 

“You'd sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubbyhole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific – because Donny [Kirshner, to whose publishing company she was signed] would play one songwriter against another. He’d say: ‘We need a new smash hit’ – and we'd all go back and write a song.”

But if in perfect harmony in the studio, outside cracks were appearing in the King-Goffin relationship. Goffin shocked his wife with his LSD use. And he was serially unfaithful to King, who divided her time between writing songs and raising her two young daughters in the suburbs. They also viewed the world in fundamentally different ways. King was serious about her work. But she did not buy into the myth of the tortured troubadour. For Goffin, without suffering there could be no art.

“I used to have this discussion with Gerry. ‘You’ve got to be a f*** up to be a genius,’ [he would say]. I would say, ‘no you don’t’. Life is going to bring you troubles anyway,” she said. “Why look for it? Why immerse yourself in the darkness? I didn’t know if I was a genius. I didn’t care if I was a genius. I just wanted to have a good life.”

By 1968 they were divorced and she had moved with the children to the West Coast. There she fell in with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. King was nobody idea’s of a hippy. She avoided drugs and was a habitual early riser. Nevertheless, among the long-hairs and the weed smokers, and perhaps for the first time, she felt as if she were among her own. The Laurel Canyon crowd saw her as an artist, not as a wife and mother or a woman intruding in a man’s world. 

Tapestry was recorded in Studio B at A&M Recording Studios in Hollywood. Serendipity had decreed that Joni Mitchell should be recording the equally influential Blue in the adjoining Studio C. The atmosphere between these two future icons was one of fellowship rather than rivalry. Mitchell and James Taylor would swing by King’s sessions. They even contributed backing vocals to You’ve Got A Friend and Will You Love Me Tomorrow.

Singing with King was a thrill for Taylor. Since first hearing her, he had been convinced of her genius. Yet, having brought her on the road, he was struck by her reluctance to take centre stage. One night, during a gig at Queen’s College in New York, he encouraged her to go out and perform solo.

“She was very tentative,” said Taylor, who would achieve a number one in 1972 with a cover of You’ve Got A Friend. “But, you know, the music takes over. Those songs she wrote are such vehicles. You just can’t lose. Once you hook into it, it’s away you go.” 

Tapestry was King’s second solo record. The first, 1970’s Writer, consisted largely of songs written with her ex-husband back in New York. For the follow-up she dived into her new life in LA. A handful of old Goffin compositions featured in the sessions. The bulk of the material was new. 

It’s Too Late featured lyrics by Toni Stern. But the big hits – I Feel The Earth Move and You’ve Got A Friend – were all King. She also repurposed (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman. Originally written for Aretha Franklin, she transformed it into a storm-tossed valentine to her new husband Charles Larkey, whom she had married in September 1970 (the couple had formed a band, The City, releasing the album Now That Everything’s Been Said). 

I Feel the Earth Move and Natural Woman blew the shutters off. Yet the project was in many ways a triumph of understatement. King would play demo recordings from Tapestry over the studio’s speaker system and then chat with the secretaries at reception. She was soaking up the music as the public would: in the background, vying with the hubbub of conversation. And she would know immediately whether something worked or not. 

“We were making a good record – that’s all we knew,” Tapestry engineer Hank Cicalo would say. “It was a simple record. Records like Tapestry could be overproduced in a minute: ‘oh let’s add more guitar’.”

“I wanted to stay simple,” said producer Lou Adler. “And always have that feeling that Carole was singing to you.”

Steeped in King’s experiences as a woman and a mother – and also, in her heartbreak over Goffin’s unfaithfulness –  the record caused an immediate sensation. A ecstatic Rolling Stone review by Jon Landau (future Bruce Springsteen manager) lit a fire under it, turning the East Coast rock establishment on to King. 

“An album of surpassing personal-intimacy and musical accomplishment and a work infused with a sense of artistic purpose,” he enthused. With that endorsement at its back, Tapestry began to sell and sell. And to her shock, King was heralded as epitomising a new kind of female artist – one who sang unselfconsciously about their hopes, their desires, their frustrations. 

 “I wasn't consciously trying to write about feminism as a political issue,” she would say. “I was simply writing about my life.”

Success brought material security. And it vindicated her decision to leave behind a steady gig as a production-line writer in New York. Almost everything else about it she considered a downside. 

“On the one hand her leap from songwriter to artist was tremendously gratifying – she was now looked up to by peers who’d once dismissed her,” wrote Sheila Weller in 2008’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation. 

“She was also happy for the financial security. Unlike so many other young pop music stars, she’d been a breadwinning mother, with an unstable ex-husband, for 12 years. But the loss of an anonymous personal life was hard on her, and she virtually barricaded herself from fame.”

Challenges, professional and personal, would follow. Having divorced her second husband, in 1975 she got hitched to struggling musician Rick Evers. He was described by the LA Times as a “psychotic wannabe who helped King flee LA for Idaho – then secluded and terrorised her”. She eventually worked up the courage to leave. Bereft, he overdosed on cocaine in 1977. 

“I had always been judgmental about women who stayed in abusive relationships,” King wrote in Natural Woman. “I’d always thought, if I found myself with a man like that, the first time he struck me I'd be out of there in a New York minute. I would never stay with an abuser. Until I did.”

But even as things turned bumpy and the hits dried up, she never seemed envious of what Tapestry had achieved. She had bottled lightning. It wasn’t going to happen again. She was fine with that. 

“People often ask me if I was disappointed when subsequent albums didn’t do as well,” she wrote in her memoir. “Some are skeptical when I say “no”. But I never expected Tapestry to achieve the success it did, and I saw no reason to expect that level of success to continue. I was just glad I could keep writing, recording, and making a good living while enjoying a normal life.”