carole king - singist or writer

She was writing songs for years before she took recording her own songs seriously. Her 1962 hit "It might as well rain until september" was actually just a demo she made to demonstrate the song (as she did for most of her early 60's hits) but the A&R thought it sounded perfect as it was and released it under her own name...

Footnote for the young people: in the olden days, acts were supposed to do live shows (in the really olden days, records were virtually recordings of live performances). Cf. the early days of the Beatles, Elvis, Etc.

Then there's Tapestry - over 10 million copies sold. I kinda enjoy her voice, but yeah, writer.

(and Martika's cover of "I Feel The Earth Move" is, like, tremor-inducing)

I know it might be simple and obvious and even cheesy, but that couplet from "So Far Away" keeps going through my head:

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?
It would be so fine to see your face at my door

It's such a great rhyme/off-rhyme, so simple, but so effective at expressing the way people experience their longings as though they were part of a shift in the world.

But oh, how I wish she'd taken a crack at Todd Rundgren's "I Saw the Light." If she had, it'd be my most favoritest record ever.

they've reissued the album, too.

I just recently discovered The City -- it's a good album! No idea why she apparently wanted to bury it for so many years, apart from its initial commercial failure. I'd never heard the original versions of "Wasn't Born to Follow" or "That Old Sweet Roll."

One of the tunes from the album from The City just showed up on one of my algorithm playlists and it knocked me for a loop.

was the song 'snow queen,' by chance?

No, I thought you’d say that. “Now That Everything’s Been Said.”

that's the title track from their one album, which is a trip

Seems a late friend of ours created a nice playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1fVaWlPFDIJrtvoHukUMvz?si=RY1qdKliQguKP6SbBNtGDw

Created by Ρεμπετολογια, just in case you can’t transliterate.

Kudos to Carole and her Kingdom!

He created lots and lots of great playlists. His year-by-year summaries from (I think) 1959 to about the mid-90s are indispensable. (After that he seems to lose interest.)

He was a dear friend of mine and is greatly missed.

On-topic: I go songwriter, but her albums are intermittently wonderful too.

(xpost to JR&tB)

Yes, I found and posted some of his artist playlists to some polls he participated in. I have seen his annual playlists before, they are amazingly long. I didn't know that you knew him, he seemed to be a great guy.

I have a lot of trouble imagining someone calling her a better singer than writer.

Wait, what? Who said that?

That's the question asked in this thread!

HD: Did you know Ρεμπετολογια via CIUT by any chance?

No, I played with him in bands of varying configurations here & there, the longest-lasting of which was a dive-bar cover band (which also included another ex-ilxor, weirdly) that was amazingly fun for what it was. I often wonder what might have become of us if we had actually rehearsed, or even made sure we knew songs all the way through before attempting to play them.

For the past decade-plus we just chatted about music & stuff whenever we saw each other, a few times a year, never enough. He was like the musical id and superego of Calgary for the past 25 years, never the ego.

When I went on a big Carole King kick a few years back he was just, “oh yeah, you might want to check out this playlist I made”

His Jamerson playlist is also a cornucopia.

Fuck cancer.

Hmm. I didn't notice any Jamerson playlist.

Bit sad, ‘pears to be gone.

Yeah the question is a bit daft, she’s an incredible songwriter, but she’s also charming as a singer imho there’s a homely quality to it, feels like you’re listening to a family member singing in the living room.

It’s specially refreshing when compared to modern studio pop vocals which sound heavily manipulated and polished.

Yes, exactly.

It’s akin to the “Bob Dylan’s more of a songwriter than a singer” line if not “Bob’s no musician.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/arts/music/toni-stern-dead.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/arts/music/toni-stern-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.UU0.JgSS.2jT9mm2joEnQ&smid=url-share

Toni Stern, a breezy young Californian who became a trusted lyricist for Carole King, providing the words for the enduring standard “It’s Too Late” and many other songs during Ms. King’s flowering as a chart-topping solo artist, died on Jan. 17 at her home in Santa Ynez, Calif., near Santa Barbara. She was 79.

Her husband and only immediate survivor, Jerry Rounds, confirmed the death. He did not specify the cause.

Ms. Stern, a Los Angeles native, was an aspiring painter and poet living in Laurel Canyon, an enclave popular with the Los Angeles rock elite, in the late 1960s. It was there that she met Ms. King, who had moved west from New Jersey after a painful breakup with her husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, with whom she had formed one of the decade’s powerhouse hit-making duos.

The two hit it off immediately. “When I moved to California in 1968, she was the epitome of a free-spirited Laurel Canyon woman,” Ms. King wrote in a Facebook post after Ms. Stern’s death. “She lived in a hillside house with her dog, Arf, surrounded by books, record albums, plants and macramé.”

I saw that obituary - I've had that album for many years now, but I never looked further into the song credits (i.e. what each of that names actually did) so it was quite a surprise to find out that Stern wrote all the lyrics to its best new song. Given the personal nature of the whole album, I thought they were mostly King's.

I was surprised to read that too

As I always do, played the Aretha/Kennedy Centre clip on her birthday yesterday for a grade 5 class.

That's a great clip