CAROLE KING - TAPESTRY

TAPESTRY

CAROLE KING

SONGWRITER: CAROLE KING

COUNTRY: U. S. A.

ALBUM: TAPESTRY

LABEL: A & M

GENRE: POP

YEAR: 1971

 

       Carole King Klein (born Carol Joan Klein; February 9, 1942) is an American singer-songwriter who has been active since 1958, initially as one of the staff songwriters at the Brill Building and later as a solo artist. She is the most successful female songwriter of the latter half of the 20th century in the US, having written or co-written 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100. King also wrote 61 hits that charted in the UK, making her the most successful female songwriter on the UK singles charts between 1962 and 2005.

               King's major success began in the 1960s when she and her first husband, Gerry Goffin, wrote more than two dozen chart hits, many of which have become standards, for numerous artists. She has continued writing for other artists since then. King's success as a performer in her own right did not come until the 1970s, when she sang her own songs, accompanying herself on the piano, in a series of albums and concerts. After experiencing commercial disappointment with her debut álbum Writer, King scored her breakthrough with the album Tapestry, which topped the U.S. album chart for 15 weeks in 1971 and remained on the charts for more than six years.

         King has made 25 solo albums, the most successful being Tapestry, which held the record for most weeks at No. 1 by a female artist for more than 20 years. Her record sales were estimated at more than 75 million copies worldwide. She has won four Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her songwriting. She is the recipient of the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the first woman to be so honored. She is also a 2015 Kennedy Center Honoree.

          Tapestry is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Carole King, released in 1971 on Ode Records and produced by Lou Adler. It is one of the best-selling albums of all time, with over 25 million copies sold worldwide. In the United States, it has been certified Diamond by the RIAA with more than 10 million copies sold. It received four Grammy Awards in 1972, including Album of the Year. The lead singles from the album—"It's Too Late"/"I Feel the Earth Move"—spent five weeks at number one on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Easy Listening charts. In 2000 it was voted number 74 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. In 2020, Tapestry was ranked number 25 on Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

My life has been a tapestry

Of rich and royal hue;

An everlasting vision

Of the ever-changing view;

A wond'rous woven magic

In bits of blue and gold;

A tapestry to feel and see;

Impossible to hold.

 

Once amid the soft silver

Sadness in the sky,

There came a man of fortune;

A drifter passing by.

He wore a torn and tattered cloth

Around his leathered hide

And a coat of many colors;

Yellow, green, on either side.

 

He moved with some uncertainty

As if he didn't know

Just what he was there for

Or where he ought to go.

Once he reached for something

Golden hanging from a tree

And his hand came down emp-ty.

 

Soon within my tapestry,

Along the rutted road,

He sat down on a river rock

And turned into a toad.

It seemed that he had fallen

Into someone's wicked spell

And I wept to see him suffer,

Though I didn't know him well.

 

As I watched in sorrow,

There suddenly appeared

A figure gray and ghostly

Beneath a flowing beard.

In times of deepest darkness

I've seen him dressed in black.

Now my tapestry's unraveling;

He's come to take me back.

He's come to take me back.