Carole King: The Creator Series #2

How she does what she does as a songwriter and performer

On Tuesday I am playing Tune Tag with Brad Kyle and, spoiler alert, my first song is from Carole King’s Tapestry album. No need to look for our tune tag as I’ll be cross-posting it here for your reading and listening pleasure — or perchance for your eye rolls, if you’re not a fan of my 70s and 80s choices.

Today’s post is about Carole King as an artist and a creator. Carole is what is termed a ‘triple threat’ in the music business — songwriter, arranger, and performer. She has undeniable talent — the Beatles called her an inspiration — and has achieved massive success by any measure. And yet, what I found when I dug deeper is that she has struggled with some significant creative and career challenges along the way, challenges that would stop most people in their tracks.

This is my summary re-telling of her story as a creator, condensed from a number of authoritative sources listed at the end and including her own and other key players’ perspectives. I think she has much to teach us about what it means to choose a creative path and stay the course. It helps if, like Carole, you love making music.

Upcoming in this series are the wunderkind Todd Rundgren, the Temptations, Peter Frampton, Tina Turner, the Rolling Stone’s Ronnie Wood, Motown head Berry Gordy, Sammy Hagar, and Blondie’s Debbie Harry (among others).

To combat AI scraping, as these posts are destined for a book, only part of this post is available to free subscribers. To become a paid subscriber and have access to the entire post, please subscribe or upgrade below — or redeem your free post. A big muchas gracias to my paid subscribers, who are making the work and resources behind these posts possible. Now, on to our creator…

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Learning to play and write

Carole King is someone who’s been immersed in music from the get-go. Perhaps most significant, there was a piano in Carole’s house and as a young child she spent many hours “matching up notes in my head with notes on the piano.” She began making up songs at age three and her mom began teaching her music theory and elementary technique at age four. She cited the fact that her parents both loved music and liked having the radio playing as an important influence. They also had a great record collection —something James Taylor similarly cited as key to his interest in music. The Alan Freed Show, which promoted pop and jazz acts on radio and as a live revue, was an inspiration to the teenage Carole as well.

At the age of 15, she volunteered to write and arrange songs for the annual high school ‘Sing,’ as well as performing some of them and teaching other students how to sing them. Encouraged by the applause and enthusiasm from teachers and students, and noting that street-corner groups were forming in high schools all over Brooklyn, she started up her own group called the Cosines, which did four-part harmony and performed at school dances and parties. She wrote the songs, played the piano, and sang, and also did arrangements for pop standards. This kind of extended practice in an amateur, low-risk context crops up in many musicians’ stories.

She told her dad she wanted to play her songs for Alan Freed. Being a fireman and able to get doors to open, he jumped into action and arranged it for her. Alan Freed listened to the songs, told her to make appointments with A&R men at record companies, and explained how the process of being a songwriter worked, including advances, royalties, and demos. (The key role models in her life were taking her seriously and supporting her dream. You can’t get better validation than that.)

That very night Carole looked up record companies in the phone book, and the next day after school rode the train into Manhattan and turned up at Atlantic Records asking to play her songs. She showed up in person figuring they’d have to see her, and perhaps it was her chutzpah or her self-confidence, or more likely the burgeoning demand for more songwriters, but they did. Company heads Jerry Wexler and Nesuhi Ertegun (co-founder with brother Ahmet) listened to her songs, told her she had talent, and asked her to come back when she had more.

Disappointed by their response, the next day she called ABC-Paramount asking for an appointment and kept calling back again and again until she got one. When she finally played her songs for Head of A&R and chief producer and arranger Don Costa, he offered her a recording contract. (We’ll hear Carole’s advice on perseverance at the end.)

After she’d signed on the dotted line with ABC-Paramount, Don Costa invited her to watch a recording session he was conducting with a full orchestra and introduced her to the engineers and players, including some top studio musicians. She sat on the side and watched him taking them through the arrangements and rehearsing them. When he had to leave the room for some reason, rather than allowing them to lose momentum, and despite having no experience leading orchestras, she jumped up and stepped to the podium, picked up the baton, and continued to rehearse them. Once he returned and found her leading the orchestra, he let them finish the song before he took the baton back from her. Again, when it came to music, she had utter self-confidence and chutzpah.

Carole recorded four of her own songs for ABC-Paramount, playing the piano backed by session musicians on guitar, bass, drums, and saxophone and, in some cases, by backup singers, with Don Costa arranging and producing. She would never hit the charts and sell enough to recoup costs, but as a teenager she was already signed to one of the biggest labels as a recording artist and gaining invaluable experience with the ins and outs of the recording process.

Carole entered Queens College in 1958 at the age of 16, at the same time as two other freshmen trying to make it in the music business, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. She discovered who they were when their photo appeared in a magazine identifying them as Tom and Jerry, whose song “Hey, Schoolgirl” had become a hit.

She and Paul became friends and made demos together of their own and other people’s songs, with Paul on guitar and bass and Carole on piano. They succeeded in selling part of an arrangement they did for the Passion’s doo-wop classic “Just to Be with You,” but to Carole’s disappointment they never collaborated on writing songs together. Paul later told her that it never occurred to him to collaborate on writing a song with someone else (as opposed to performing).

Carole had great confidence in her music but none in her lyrics, and her big hope at that time was to find a lyricist to serve as her songwriting partner. The universe decided to provide.

Songwriting for others in Tin Pan Alley

She met Gerry Goffin at college when she was 16, and as he drove her home that day, he told her about a book and lyrics for a musical he’d written for which he needed music. She in turn told him about her recording contract and said Atlantic was looking for a song. He said, “‘Why don’t we write something for them?’” Once they got to her house, and after she’d introduced him to her mom, Carole and Gerry sat down and wrote their first song together in less than an hour. Atlantic bought it and recorded it. They continued to write songs together, got married, worked day jobs while writing after dinner, and sold songs here and there.

One day on Broadway Carole ran into Neil Sedaka, who had been in a rival street-corner group in Brooklyn, and he suggested that she and Gerry try writing songs for Don Kirschner and Al Nevins at Aldon Publishing. She called and got an appointment for the next day, played for them, returned with Gerry the day after, and they were offered and accepted a three-year publishing contract. They now officially worked in the famous Tin Pan Alley.  

During their years at Aldon Publishing, Carole and Gerry wrote songs made to order either for a specific artist or for Aldon to shop around to different artists. According to fellow songwriter Barry Mann, who wrote with his wife and lyricist Cynthia Weil, it was like a “songwriting school” as opposed to a songwriting factory. Carole called it a songwriting bootcamp. Once a song was commissioned, the songwriting teams competed to produce the best song within a short window of time (usually a day). They all worked in the same room in cubicles containing an upright piano, a small table, and a chair, and could hear what everyone else was doing. Carole also brought her newborn daughter Louise to the office. In this environment, Carole learned to write the music for a song in as little as 20 minutes.

In the fall of 1960, Don Kirschner wanted a follow-up to “Tonight’s the Night” for the Shirelles. From among the songs the competing teams had come up with, he chose Carole and Gerry’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” sending Carole upstairs in the same building to play it for the head of Scepter Records. Scepter wanted to record it right away and had Carole do a demo right then and there in their studio. Besides writing the melody, she also arranged the string parts, having to refer to a handbook for instruction as she’d never done a strings arrangement before. The song went to number one — the first ever by a black girl group — and stayed in the top ten for seven weeks. Gerry quit his day job, they got childcare, and from then on they were both full-time songwriters, continuing to write together and with other Aldon songwriters. Here’s a wonderful live version of the song that changed their fortunes and supercharged their careers:

Carole and Gerry wrote almost 80 songs together and had an astonishing number of top ten hits on the US or UK charts, at least 29 by my count (see list here). For example:

• “I’m into Something Good” – Herman’s Hermits

• “Up on the Roof” – the Drifters

• “Pleasant Valley Sunday” – the Monkees

• “Take Good Care of My Baby” – Bobby Vee

• “Go Away Little Girl” – Steve Lawrence

• “The Loco-Motion” – Little Eva

• “One Fine Day” – the Chiffons

• “Don’t Bring Me Down” – the Animals

• “Some of Your Lovin’” – Dusty Springfield

Their final breakout hit on the Hot 100 chart happened in 1967 after Jerry Wexler pulled up in his limo next to them and said, “I’m looking for a really big hit for Aretha…How about writing a song called ‘Natural Woman’?” He rolled away and they talked about it on the way home. As Jerry tells it, as soon as they got their two girls to bed, “You sat down at the piano and out came some gospel chords in 6/8 tempo. Those chords were exactly where I thought the song should go. You made it really easy for me to come out with the lyrics. You made it effortless.” She agreed. “It was unbelievable how right they were, and we both knew it.”

The song became the Aretha standard, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and Carole also included it on Tapestry. Here she is singing and playing it unaccompanied on BBC in Concert on the day of Tapestry’s release:

The art and craft of songwriting

Carol explains her approach to songwriting in her autobiography: