Carole King: 'Tapestry: Legacy Edition'
BACKTRACKING
The 1971 album is paired with a series of live recordings for a full appreciation of the groundbreaking project.
Carole King's "Tapestry," which has been rereleased in a deluxe CD package, is one of the biggest-selling and most honored albums of all time, but it's 37 years old, so a few words of reintroduction may be necessary.
Indeed, a recent, mostly glowing consumer review of the album on a major commercial website begins, "You probably haven't heard the name before, but I bet you already know quite a few of her tunes."
For anyone who is hazy about King, here's one easy way to think of "Tapestry": It's the 1970s equivalent of Norah Jones' "Come Away With Me" -- only with better songs.
The collections have more in common than millions in sales and album of the year Grammy Awards. They are wonderfully classy and restrained works that broke from the main commercial trends of their day.
In King's case, "Tapestry," along with such other distinguished works as Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" and James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James," offered a calm, comforting tone after the social and musical turbulence of the late 1960s.
Like Young and Taylor, King tried to refocus attention on such classical values as friendship, loved ones and home. The key song, which Taylor later turned into a No. 1 hit, was aptly titled "You've Got a Friend."
But comforting tones and songwriting excellence aren't the whole story with "Tapestry." King is a much better songwriter than singer, but producer Lou Adler framed King's thin voice brilliantly with gentle, tasteful backing that turned her limitations into a strength. The result was a series of vocals every bit as warm and inviting as the themes.
Even after all these years, "Tapestry" sounds honest and inspiring. The bonus in the two-disc package is a series of live versions from the 1970s of all but one song on "Tapestry." They feature just King's voice and piano.
Adler, who also worked with the Mamas & the Papas, tells Harvey Kubernik in the liner notes that the understated mood of "Tapestry" was greatly influenced by his fondness for King's original "demo" versions of the songs.
"What I was trying to do was re-create their feel by staying simple so that you could visualize Carole sitting there, playing piano and singing, so that it wasn't 'just a piano player,' it was Carole," he said.
