If you wanted to be uncharming on her eightieth birthday this Wednesday, you could say: Before she heralded the singer/songwriter epoch like a female Elton John, she was the naturally more beautiful part of the two-headed hit monster Goffin/King, the provided the American gold standard for pop and rock compositions since 1960, just as commercial and similarly formulaic as Leiber/Stoller or Pomus/Shumann, while being less idiosyncratic than the British Lennon/McCartney or Jagger/Richards.
Edo Reents
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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Carole King married Gerry Goffin at seventeen and was a record millionaire by eighteen.
With him she wrote for the Everly Brothers, the Drifters, the Byrds, Aretha Franklin and for many others: The Loco-Motion, Up On The Roof, Take Good Care Of My Baby, One Fine Day ’, ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ – long-running hit parade hits on both sides of the Atlantic, for which her husband came up with the lyrics and she the music, which made her the most successful in the Anglo-Saxon world, ahead of Joni Mitchell and probably also the most important female composer ever.
She could do that in her sleep
The couple probably mastered the first and last requirement of pop music in their sleep: expressing complex sentiments in understandable verse and catchy melodies, thereby achieving maximum connectivity without being clichéd.
But after three minutes the fun had to be over;
The fine gentlemen in New York's Brill Building, which has made a significant contribution to the professionalization of pop music, would not have accepted anything else.
These were essentially commissioned works, with which, in addition to the authors themselves, music publishers and record companies had to make money and which accordingly stayed away from the indecency or incitement that classic rock 'n' roll had only practiced a short time before.
At the beginning of the new decade, Carole King added another career to what was already an extraordinary career that can only be described in superlatives.
After splitting from Goffin and under the influence of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, she cocooned into a solo butterfly of demure beauty and strange otherness.
Her debut album, Writer (1970), for which she really only had to look through the Goffin/King catalog again, sparkled like a diamond in the rough but, despite the rocky, unpolished undertones, was not a great success.
All the more so then “Tapestry” (1971), this piano chord-turned-sensation, which according to recent estimates has sold around 75 million copies, is definitely one of the greatest record successes of all time.
with her warm
like a voice with a sniffle, she intoned her lyrically deepened, generation-specific skeptical material that fit her, the superstar who was already comparatively old at 29, like a glove.
She focused on elegance rather than strength and was in control of her emotions at all times.
Probably thanks to this slowed down game, songs like "It's Too Late" or "You've Got A Friend" reached this immense range;
the downside was that their interpreter, once apostrophized as the "master singer of the Jewish blues", scared no one in the emerging hard rock age and even more dynamic songs like "I Feel The Earth Move" and "Smackwater Jack" sounded almost like middle-class gospel .
Probably out of conviction she provided cultivated entertainment,
A key figure in pop nobility
With flawless recordings, including a lovely collaboration with children's author Maurice Sendak, she kept her output steady throughout the decade;
but their influence waned.
However, she remained what she had been as a minor - a key figure of American pop nobility, who preferred to work in the background, enlightened, tolerant and strictly democratic.
Ten years ago, she denied rumors of withdrawal that she herself had started.
She regularly releases concert or old demo recordings, nothing really new.
On this side of rhythm & blues, easy listening, gospel and jazz, there is no longer a wheel that she could reinvent.
But the time is now ripe for a late work.