Ode 77009
Producer: Lou Adler
Track listing: I Feel the Earth Move / So Far Away / It’s Too Late / Home Again / Beautiful / Way Over Yonder / You’ve Got a Friend / Where You Lead / Will Still Love Me Tomorrow? / Smackwater Jack / Tapestry / (You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Women
June 19, 1971
15 Weeks
Tapestry was Carole King’s first chart-topping album as an artist, but as a songwriter, with her first husband Gerry Goffin, she had contributed songs to such Number One albums as The Monkees, More of the Monkees, and Blood, Sweat & Tears 3.
King didn’t have much initial success as a vocalist. Her first single, 1959’s “Baby Sittin’,” failed to catch on. A year later, “Oh Neil,” King’s answer song to Neil Sedaka’s “Oh Carol,” also went nowhere. After a decade of constructing such hits as “The Loco-Motion” with Goffin at the famed Brill Building, King was encouraged to record her own songs again by her friend James Taylor. Writer: Carole King, released in 1970, was a commercial disappointment, but it inspired King to begin work on a follow-up.
“I did not think about commercial success at that time,” King says. Since Taylor inspired King to record her own material again, it was only fitting that he was featured on several tracks, and King returned the favor by playing piano on his Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon album, which included a cover of King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”
Says King, “We would record my songs and then we would go to another studio where James was recording his album. It was one kind of continuous album in our minds.” On Tapestry, Taylor played acoustic guitar on “So Far Away,” “Home Again,” Way Over Yonder,” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” On the latter track, he also was featured as a backing vocalist with Joni Mitchell. The duo was billed as “the Mitchell-Taylor Boy-and-Girl Choir” on the album credits.
The sessions, conducted in January of 1971 at A&M Studios B & C in Hollywood, went smoothly, King recalls. Producer Lou Adler had first worked with King back in 1962. Aside from producing her most successful albums, Adler owned the Ode label and served as King’s manager. King named the album after a piece of needlepoint that would be featured on the album’s cover photo and later given to Adler as a gift.
On February 10, Tapestry was released. The first single, a double-A side featuring “It’s Too Late” and “I Feel the Earth Move,” was released on April 16. Two months later, it topped the Hot 100 as Tapestry pried the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers from the Number One position of the Top LP’s chart. Yet King had other things on her mind. “I was very much more involved with my family,” says King. “I had experienced Number One records before as a writer and I was about to have my third child.”
On July 31, with Tapestry still holding firm at the top, Taylor scored his first Number One single with his version of King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”
Tapestry‘s 15-week reign atop the chart marked the most weeks spent at Number One by an album since the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. The album’s entire chart run was even more impressive — it stayed on the chart for an incredible 302 weeks, making it the longest-charting album by a female solo artist.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of June 19, 1971
1. Tapestry, Carole King
2. Sticky Fingers, The Rolling Stones
3. Ram, Paul and Linda McCartney
4. Jesus Christ Superstar, Various artists
5. Carpenters, Carpenters