Tapestry

Carole King first made her mark in the music industry as a songwriter, with a string of hits in the 60’s written in collaboration with her then husband, Gerry Goffin. These included The Shirelles 1960 hit “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”, “Up on the Roof” for the Drifters, “The Locomotion” for Litle Eva (and later by Grand Funk), The Monkees' “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and many others.

She started singing her own songs in 1970, and in 1971 issued her second album, Tapestry, which topped the charts for 15(!!!) weeks – the most ever by a female artist, was the Album of the year and won her a Grammy, as did ‘It’s Too Late’ from the album as Record of the Year.

Lou Adler, the album producer said that in an 2008 interview on PBS:

It’s one of the first albums that I started noticing sequence and continuity of songs, so that it wasn’t a roller coaster emotional ride — it was a smooth ride… As music often does, it becomes the soundtrack of the particular time. What I think happened late ’70, ’71 with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Carole, is that the listening public and the record-buying public bought into the honesty and the vulnerability of the singer-songwriter, naked in the sense…