The City: Now That's Everything Been Said

THE CITY: NOW THAT EVERYTHING'S BEEN SAID (1968)

1) Snow Queen; 2) I Wasn't Born To Follow; 3) Now That Everything's Been Said; 4) Paradise Alley; 5) A Man Without A Dream; 6) Victim Of Circumstance; 7) Why Are You Leaving; 8) Lady; 9) My Sweet Home; 10) I Don't Believe It; 11) Hi-De-Ho; 12) All My Time.

To round things out with Carole King, it is more than appropriate to include a mention of this record in her section — because it is only a pure technical formality, actually, that prevents one from including this, the first and last ever album of «The City», as the first entry in her regular discography. Indeed, before she went completely solo with Writer, there was this rather curious attempt, perhaps driven on by humility and shyness, to pass as just a piano-playing and singing member of a rock trio, with future husband Charles Larkey on bass and Danny Kortchmar on guitar. (Incidentally, the guest drummer here is Jim Gordon, of future Derek & The Dominos fame, though he hardly gets to swing and shine as efficiently here as he would there).

Actually, the only significant difference between Now That Everything's Been Said and Writer is that Danny gets to sing a couple of the songs — other than that, the sound is pretty much iden­tical, and all the songwriting comes from Carole and her lyrical co-writers: mostly Goffin, but also Toni Stern and David Palmer, all of whom would contribute words for Carole's music in the future as well. Importantly, this is where you will find Carole's first recorded versions of ʽSnow Queenʼ, ʽWasn't Born To Followʼ (already done by The Byrds), and ʽHi-De-Hoʼ (soon to be appropriated by Blood, Sweat & Tears); but even more importantly, this is the only place where you will find a small bunch of quite exquisite King originals that cannot be found anywhere else, and each of which is worth far more than any complete post-1982 Carole King album.

One is ʽParadise Alleyʼ, a simple-innocent pop rocker with an intricate arrangement of vocal overdubs in the chorus — from a time when heart-tugging moves came to the lady's imagination more naturally than earthquakes come to the Ring of Fire. Another is ʽWhy Are You Leavingʼ, with equally poignant vocal work on the chorus (the task is to sing the line "why are you lea­ving?" in as many different ways as possible, and it is accomplished). And still another great vocal move is found on the closing ʽAll My Timeʼ, where she plays around with her own echo: few people can just take a single line like "all my time, all my time belongs to you" and make it sound like an inspiring religious mantra, but this is exactly what is happening here, with a little help from that echo, of course.

That said, none of these songs is great from top to bottom: mostly we are dealing with a beautiful idea enclosed in a merely-okay setting. Although the record was already produced by Lou Adler, which means that the overall sound is tasteful and pleasant, Carole does act fairly shy, and there are no tracks where she and her piano would be in primary focus — most of the time, the «ca­mera» tries to put her in the context of her musician friends, yet the musician friends, too, try to keep it humble in order to give the piano lady her due, and so in the end it all comes down to a set of «after you, sir»'s and «after you, Ma'm»'s that is not highly satisfactory. In addition, what with Carole's writing style being so personal, it simply made no sense in the first place to not behave as a full-fledged solo artist, and I guess the public must have sensed that, too — «The City» never really managed to get decent publicity or to sell a significant amount of records. Heck, it even took more than thirty years to get it released on CD, and good luck trying to find a physical copy these days: if it weren't for the digital era, Now That's Everything Been Said would simply be forgotten. As it is, hopefully we will still remember it as a timid, but important first step in King's self-realization, and treasure it lightly for its share of proverbially heart-warming, oh-so-Carole King moments, so a thumbs up all the same.

Carole King: The Carnegie Hall Concert

CAROLE KING: THE CARNEGIE HALL CONCERT (1971; 1996)

1) I Feel The Earth Move; 2) Home Again; 3) After All This Time; 4) Child Of Mine; 5) Carry Your Load; 6) No Easy Way Down; 7) Song Of Long Ago; 8) Snow Queen; 9) Smackwater Jack; 10) So Far Away; 11) It's Too Late; 12) Eventually; 13) Way Over Yonder; 14) Beautiful; 15) You've Got A Friend; 16) Will You Still Love Me Tomor­row / Some Kind Of Wonderful / Up On The Roof; 17) (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.

It was probably deemed excessive to release this show officially in its own time, what with Tapestry already riding high on the charts and Music almost in the can by the time the show was played (June 18, 1971), but it is still a shame that the world at large had to wait 25 years before the tape was finally restored, remastered, and put out in CD format, because this is not just a very special concert, historically, but it is fairly unique on a personal level as well — the Carnegie Hall Concert was literally Carole King's first serious live appearance ever, and it is not every day that you get to witness a musical genius opening him/herself up to an admiring, but demanding public for the first time in his/her life.

Carole did not yet have a firmly put together backing band at the time, although I am not sure if the first part of the concert was completely solo out of necessity or because it was an intentional decision on her part — «if I'm really gonna do it, I should go all the way!» Eventually, she is joined on the stage by some musicians — first by Larkey on bass, then by Danny Kortchmar on guitar, then even by a small string section — but essentially this is just Lady Writer challenged to step into the shoes of Lady Performer, because whoever heard of a number one pop star without a con­cert agenda? This is not 1966 and you are no John Lennon, so show yourself.

This is precisely what makes this archival release so very special — with Carole's In Concert record that came out two years before this one, you get her as a seasoned professional, but here you get her as a nervous, evidently insecure, but still deeply enthusiastic «beginner» whose only chance of winning over the audience is being as natural as possible. You might find yourself rooting for her, intensely, as you sense the nervous tremble of the voice on the early songs (par­ticularly the drawn-out ballads — ʽChild Of Mineʼ is just barely held together), but then, after a few tunes, there comes a realization that everything is going along smoothly, and we can finally relax a bit. Predictably, there's quite a bit of stage banter, too — little details and not particularly funny jokes that help break up some barriers and alleviate some of that tension — but Carole is such a lovable person in general that whatever she does for a giggle is fine by me.

Naturally, the setlist (as any Carole King setlist ever played) is stuffed with Tapestry songs (10 out of 12), plus four songs off Writer and three previews of songs from Music, so there will be few surprises here. The biggest «surprise», explicitly announced by Carole as "Surprise!", is the appearance of James Taylor, who duets with her on ʽYou've Got A Friendʼ and the ensuing three-song medley — well, what do you want, it's James Taylor, and in situations like these you can treat him as just another piece of reliable furniture that Carole needs to step upon in order to achieve the desired effect. (I wish there were a less crude metaphor to express just how ordinary and bland I find the guy's singing, but I refuse to strain my brain over James Taylor). At least he has the decency to disappear while Carole sings ʽNatural Womanʼ for the encore, because that would make us think that it is James Taylor who makes her feel like a natural woman, and that would be strange, because I'd say the only thing that James Taylor is able to make one feel like would be a 2-year old.

Anyway, this is not about James Taylor, this is about some great, great songs that are well worth hearing in these stripped-down arrangements — she can still make ʽI Feel The Earth Moveʼ rock quite a bit with just the voice and the piano, and ʽSmackwater Jackʼ, propelled only by Larkey's bass and the audience's enthralled handclapping, ends up almost as fun as it was on the original record. On ʽIt's Too Lateʼ, after Kortchmar has joined the group for lead guitar support, Carole makes some meyowing noises, mimicking his guitar tone and bringing some levity to the mourn­ful atmosphere of the song; and on songs like ʽNo Easy Way Downʼ, she serves as her own backing vocalist, preserving the soaring-and-descending modulation of the vocal melody as best as possible — this is not rigid professionalism, but it's a well-meaning attempt to keep things exciting and interesting through the whole show. By the time she's done, you'll want to pin a medal on her, for a first job well done; and although I wouldn't have expected it from myself, I do find myself occasionally revisiting the album instead of Tapestry — particularly when I'm in the mood for a bit less production slickness and a bit more of that elusive «raw edge».

I will not say that this is the only Carole King live album you will ever need: 1994's In Concert and the Living Room Tour both had their own charm as well, not to mention a more diversified setlist and an angst-free, self-assured vocal performance. But this here stuff goes so hand in hand with Tapestry that I do believe that at some future point they might want to delete it from the catalog as an independent album and just stick it together with Tapestry, as a bonus disc, for all eternity. It's just one of those «well, we've just finished polishing some of the best songs ever, now all we have to do is make them come alive without any makeup on» moments that you have to experience, sooner or later, even at the expense of a flesh-and-blood James Taylor completing the picture. Totally a thumbs up here.

Carole King: A Holiday Carole

CAROLE KING: A HOLIDAY CAROLE (2011)

1) My Favorite Things; 2) Carol Of The Bells; 3) Sleigh Ride; 4) Christmas Paradise; 5) Everyday Will Be Like A Holiday; 6) Chanukah Prayer; 7) Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas; 8) I Got My Love To Keep Me Warm; 9) Christmas In The Air; 10) Do You Hear What I Hear; 11) This Christmas; 12) New Year's Day.

Come to think of it, it is weird that Carole had to wait until she was nearly seventy years old to release a Christmas album — with her cozy domestic attitudes and pure love for sentimental sim­plicity with a touch of the patriarchal (matriarchal?) spirit, this should have happened several decades earlier; then again, the «Christmas album virus» does tend to typically infect people only after their immune system has been severely ravaged by multiple bouts of writer's block, and now that the lady has little, if anything, left to lose, it's exactly the same question of «why not?» as it is for, say, Jethro Tull or Aretha Franklin.

So we've got some bad news and some good news for you here. Starting off with the good: in terms of instruments and arrangements, this is Carole's best-sounding record in almost, let's see... thirty years, I guess — the last time her songs sounded that natural and unsuffocated by studio gloss was on 1982's One To One (not that it was a masterpiece or anything, but the basic sound stayed true to the genuine C. King spirit). Other than the piano sound (why do they really have to use these electronic keyboards in the studio when they could easily go for a nice Steinway?), we have a real band backing the artist, acoustic drums, guitars, winds, strings, real live harmonies, and practically no traces of the «new R&B sound» that made her last two attempts at a come­back so painfully contaminated with something that was so much not Carole King. Christmas or no Christmas, I felt really at ease while listening to this.

The bad news now: alas, it is that time when the lady should be taking a break from singing. The aging has finally taken place, and if Love Makes The World still sounded (vocal-wise) much like the same old Carole, the next ten years finally took their merciless toll. She has lost a part of her higher range (occasionally making it real painful for the ears when she tries to hit a high note, e. g. on ʽI Got My Love To Keep Me Warmʼ), and the rest of it has developed a crackle — not stereotypically senile (in all honesty, you still wouldn't be able to precisely tell the age of the singer), but just a grating crackle that makes the whole «saved-by-charisma» thing of the past... well, more or less a thing of the past.

With the bad and the good news outcanceling each other, A Holiday Carole would be complete­ly and utterly useless if not for the fact that the record was largely a product of Carole's daughter, Louise, who co-produced it, sang some harmonies (I think), co-wrote several of the new songs, and seems to have even been the author of the idea. And she does offer a curious touch every now and then, like the slow jazz arrangement of ʽChanukah Prayerʼ where she joins her mother in said prayer along with her own son — three generations of Kleins remembering their roots in a non-totally-boring-predictable manner. She's not that good a songwriter, though: ʽChristmas Paradiseʼ is an admirable, but not very exciting attempt at diversifying the proceedings with some Latin rhythms; ʽChristmas In The Airʼ is family-oriented funk-pop with no interesting twists; and ʽNew Year's Dayʼ is a well-meant try to write a piano ballad in her mother's trademark style, but about as memorable as mother's latter day out-of-steam writings — apparently, just one more case of the parent's talent not being transmitted to the child; I cannot blame Louise Goffin for lack of taste in production or poorly chosen direction, but a genius like her mother she sure is not.

Still, like most of these projects, the purpose of A Holiday Carole is not to make a brand new artistic statement, but more personal — to remind the world that the artist is still alive, and, I guess, to prove to herself that she is still capable of something. And she is — vocal crackle aside, she is still a warm and kind human being who can hardly generate negative emotions even when operating within a fairly banal framework. And, after all, it is at least nice to see her, on what is probably the last serious studio project of her life, to reject trendiness and just go for some good old eternal values, no matter how old-fashioned, conservative, retrograde, or generic they might seem to anybody under 50 at the moment. (For that matter, why is it so that the UK / European release of this record came out under the title A Christmas Carole, and the US album was titled A Holiday Carole? Is this a solitary case of the American market displaying more political cor­rectness than the British one?..)

Carole King: Love Makes The World

CAROLE KING: LOVE MAKES THE WORLD (2001)

1) Love Makes The World; 2) You Can Do Anything; 3) The Reason; 4) I Wasn't Gonna Fall In Love; 5) I Don't Know; 6) Oh No Not My Baby; 7) It Could Have Been Anyone; 8) Monday Without You; 9) An Uncommon Love; 10) You Will Find Me There; 11) Safe Again; 12) This Time.

Every once in a while you might come across a warmly positive mention of this record as a «return to form» for Carole King in the new millennium — so let this review serve as a warning, because while we all have the right to love and cherish Ms. King as a 21-st century relic of a great age in popular songwriting, and her radiance and optimism (and voice, for that matter) show no sign of decay even as she is pushing 60, this should not be an excuse to give a truly insipid, by-the-book collection of poorly written and generically arranged adult pop tunes anything more than a passing glance. In fact, there's so much commonplace saccharine here that it almost makes City Streets seem like tough punk-rock in retrospect.

Not a lot of people (at least, not a lot of people whose musical opinions I'd be interested in) would regard it as a good sign that the «biggest» song here is ʽThe Reasonʼ, originally written by Carole for Aerosmith and having since then become a big hit for Celine Dion — with Celine herself reprising her part and singing a duet with the songwriter. Not a lot of people would find comfort, either, in hearing K. D. Lang support Carole on the even more insipid Disney-style ballad ʽAn Uncommon Loveʼ — and these are some of the biggest guest stars on the album, whose rather predictable cast also includes Steven Tyler on the upbeat pop rocker ʽMonday Without Youʼ (one of the few enjoyable numbers here), Wynton Marsalis on ʽI Wasn't Gonna Fall In Loveʼ (he may be a talented musician for all I know, but boy does he like to lend a hand to all sorts of schlock by other people), and Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds as producer on most of the tracks, which might just be the root of all the other problems, but I don't feel much like investigating.

In short, when your first song sounds like Mariah Carey (without the smallest sign of redemption in the form of a powerhouse vocal) and your second song sounds like The Backstreet Boys (with­out the smallest sign of redemption in principle), the only remaining question is: «Is there any­thing worth pulling out of the wreckage?» Well, other than ʽMonday Without Youʼ, which at least gets a good physical groove going on... no, not really. The saddest thing of all is that within such a bland context, even a remake of an old classic like ʽOh No Not My Babyʼ sounds toothless and just as unexciting as everything else.

And here, I think, lies the answer to the question about why Carole did not put out even one LP of completely new material since 2001 — not to mention performing only one song from this one (the title track) on her ensuing Living Room tour; she may not confess it in public, but I'm pretty sure that deep down inside herself she knows very well that she has had nothing whatsoever left to say since at least the early Eighties, and all she can do in terms of creativity is depend on the kindness of babyfaced strangers. Which is actually worse than it could have been — at the very least, she could have chosen «retro» arrangement and production values for her new stuff, making it sound at least superficially like Tapestry. Instead, she is now trying to emulate the corny «Divas» who owe her much of their own existence in the first place — and ends up in the same ditch as Aretha Franklin, with their late-era careers having quite a bit in common. Anyway, in case you were wondering, no, this is not a comeback. Her live shows at the time were still won­derful, but this new studio material — terrible, just terrible. Thumbs down, definitely.

Carole King: In Concert

CAROLE KING: IN CONCERT (1994)

1) Hard Rock Cafe; 2) Up On The Roof; 3) Smackwater Jack; 4) So Far Away; 5) Beautiful; 6) Natural Woman; 7) Hold Out For Love; 8) Will You Love Me Tomorrow; 9) Jazzman; 10) It's Too Late; 11) Chains; 12) I Feel The Earth Move; 13) You've Got A Friend; 14) Locomotion; 15) You've Got A Friend.

I like how this was officially called The Colour Of Your Dreams Tour, yet a grand total of one song from that album actually made it onto the accompanying live album — perhaps she did perform a bit more on stage, but I doubt it, because, well, it's Carole King, and if Carole King goes on stage, she has to do Tapestry in its entirety (8 out of 12 songs, to be accurate — the other four they don't play on the radio that often), plus a few of the lively golden oldies like ʽChainsʼ and ʽLocomotionʼ, and before you know it, you're running out of time and nobody wants to hear the crap you've been writing of late anyway. Who we're kidding?

Time has pretty much rendered this record useless, particularly now that the vaults have been opened and you can listen to a young and fresh Carole singing the same songs at Carnegie Hall in 1971 — but she does have the advantage of preserving her voice and charisma in an immaculate state, so as long as she and her band do not tamper too seriously with the songs, it doesn't make that much difference whether you're listening to a 1971 or a 1993 performance: the lady carries that classic vibe with her in her pocket wherever she goes, and she'll be sticking to her guns even if we all turn into a bunch of grinning post-modern nihilists overnight.

Unfortunately, from time to time they do tamper with the songs, and as hard it is to spoil a great Carole King tune when Carole King herself is performing it, they almost succeed with ʽBeautifulʼ, which is given a smooth and soulless adult contemporary sheen — apparently, as a «pleasant surprise» for the audience, which sits in befuddled silence as it is treated with several bars of a milk-curdling «atmospheric» intro, then feebly cheers at the sounds of "you gotta wake up every morning...", with most of the people probably feeling duped rather than pleasantly surprised. A less serious misfire is the new glam-rock setting for ʽChainsʼ, with distorted guitars and fiery solos — the song does not exactly lose its fun quotient, but the fun does seem cheapened.

If it's any consolation, lead guitar duties are consistently handled by none other than Slash, who now takes it to the stage after collaborating with Carole on ʽHold Out For Loveʼ — yes, that is the one and only song from Colour Of Your Dreams that made it onto here, with a dutifully ex­tended lead guitar break from the man, and Carole also encourages him to let his hair down (as if it already weren't) every time she does a «rocker», which leads to odd results. Then again, you just might be interested in Slash's take on ʽLocomotionʼ or ʽJazzmanʼ (ʽJazzmanʼ actually works very well, with inspired solos from all of the band members, including short, energetic breaks from the bassist and drummer), because, after all, we're not talking about some completely gene­ric hair metal guitar player here... aren't we?

I could certainly do without Carole choosing one of her worst songs ever to open the concert (ʽHard Rock Cafeʼ — no, Ms. King, not even the presence of Slash legitimizes any part of this as a «hard rock» show, even if it does kick ass from time to time), and while I have nothing against backing choirs or Crosby and Nash, it was hardly necessary to include two versions of ʽYou've Got A Friendʼ, one of them with a young choir and the other one with two aging hippies. Why not do ʽRaspberry Jamʼ as an encore instead? Surely her band is capable of building up a beauti­ful not-altogether-pop vibe — they do it well enough on ʽJazzmanʼ.

But in the overall context of these 73 minutes of live performance, that is nitpicking; and as much as these echoes of Carole's insipid early 1990s style jab and sting the senses from time to time, I cannot agree with the oc­casional assessment that on this album, Carole redoes her classics «in Nineties' fashion». Most of the arrangement details and accompanying vibes really stay the same, so, if anything, this album works as proof that if you wanted to go to a Carole King show in 1993, you needn't be afraid that she'd fuck it up too much. Does it prove anything else? Well, it does offer hope that any Carole King show, as long as she's alive, will always be enjoyable to a large degree — actually, I have the Living Room Tour DVD from 2005, and it's even better than this one (no bad songs whatsoever), though probably not worth a separate review. The only important thing is never to let her remember that it's not 1971 anymore. — you do that, and you're in for a huge embarassment, almost inevitably.

Carole King: Colour Of Your Dreams

CAROLE KING: COLOUR OF YOUR DREAMS (1993)

1) Lay Down My Life; 2) Hold Out For Love; 3) Standing In The Rain; 4) Now And Forever; 5) Wishful Thinking; 6) Colour Of Your Dreams; 7) Tears Falling Down On Me; 8) Friday's Tie-Dye Nightmare; 9) Just One Thing; 10) Do You Feel Love; 11) It's Never Too Late.

This is quite a sad story, really. The early Nineties saw plenty of (at least temporary) comebacks by veterans, revitalized by the general «shredding of the excesses» of the previous decade — and one could have sincerely hoped that Carole King could fall in that category. Unfortunately, it did not happen: Colour Of Your Dreams (yes, the full British spelling is quite explicit on the cover) is about as inspiring and coloUrful as its album cover, which, like City Streets, seems to be making yet another point of Carole as «tough street girl», sort of the female equivalent of Bruce Springsteen in his «tough street guy» incarnation. But it looks fake and cheap, and so does the overall style of the songs.

Bad news arrive immediately — the first five seconds of the record, when a few seemingly Casio chords boink against a thin cobweb of cheap drum machine beats, may be enough to turn you off immediately, «now and forever», to quote one of the song titles. And while it does get better than that eventually, this is still a true sign that production issues have not been normalized — much of the record remains inescapably stuck in plastic adult contemporary mode (no surprise, really, considering that Rudy Guess is retained as co-producer from last time). In 1983 or even 1989, this could have merely meant yielding to fashionable pressure; alas, in 1993 this means that the artist is not sensing any problem with such an approach, and what could be technically forgiven several years back (horrible production back then could still somehow agree with decent melodies, see Fleetwood Mac's Tango In The Night, for instance), is now a crime against humanity.

Not that the record is particularly lazy or anything. Carole tries her hand at several different styles, alternating between quiet piano ballads (or synth ballads), loud idealistic anthems (ʽHold Out For Loveʼ, with Mr. Slash himself making a guest appearance), soft-pop-rockers (title track, fast tempo and tough attitude attached), odd Dylanesque blues-rock tell-tales (ʽFriday's Tie-Dye Night­mareʼ), and then there's even a couple of nostalgic pushbacks with ex-husband Goffin, re­sulting in ʽStanding In The Rainʼ (supposedly a follow-up to ʽCrying In The Rainʼ?) and ʽIt's Never Too Lateʼ, whose title clearly echoes ʽIt's Too Lateʼ, yet the song itself is like a carbon copy, mood-wise and style-wise, of ʽNatural Womanʼ, what with the tempo, the broken piano patterns, the musical ascension, the gospel harmonies — everything.

But I don't feel as if any of that stuff really works. The Goffin/King numbers are precisely what they are — faint, unconvincing echoes of former glories, way too self-conscious and too bent on looking into the past for inspiration. The pseudo-Dylan song is an embarassment — she is trying to throw up a heap of nonsensical lyrics as if she were Bob circa '65, and she might just as well be trying her hand at a Handel-style oratorio. The title track is bland and inoffensive at best. And the most recognizable tune of 'em all, ʽNow And Foreverʼ, may only be so because it was used in A League Of Their Own, a corny baseball melodrama with Tom Hanks and Geena Davis with Billy Joel and James Taylor on the soundtrack to complete the curdled milk effect.

The only good thing I can say is that the voice is still intact, along with the overall radiance, idealism, and charisma: spiritually, Carole King never grows old, and that's adorable — and on a personal basis, probably more important than still being able to come up with unforgettable melo­dies. However, this does not save the album from a thumbs down assessment. The least she could have done in this situation was to make all the record sound like ʽIt's Never Too Lateʼ — even if the genius has departed, this might have been a tasteful, if still forgettable, trip down nos­talgia lane. As it is, it's a rather glum mix of nostalgia with banality and corniness, hardly for­givable for a songwriter of Carole's stature even in her later years.

Carole King: City Streets

CAROLE KING: CITY STREETS (1989)

1) City Streets; 2) Sweet Life; 3) Down To The Darkness; 4) Lovelight; 5) I Can't Stop Thinking About You; 6) Legacy; 7) Ain't That The Way; 8) Midnight Flyer; 9) Homeless Heart; 10) Someone Who Believes In You.

A six-year break from a hitherto diligent recording career meant that, by the grace of God above and lenience of Devil below, we have been deprived of that one «1986 Carole King album», with  guest appearances by Rod Stewart and Jon Bon Jovi, six songs co-written with Desmond Child and Diane Warren, and produced by Phil Collins, that could have been the final agonizing scream of her reputation. Instead, she preferred to go for a (barely noticeable) acting career for a while, and remain in seclusion until her muse came rapping at the door.

And so, in the place of a hideously awful synth-pop album from 1986, we get a pleasantly boring adult contemporary album in 1989. Co-produced by Carole herself and a little-known guitarist called Rudy Guess (who would later support Carole on some of her tours and passed away in 2010), City Streets is... well, probably what you'd expect a 1989 Carole King album to be: a cozy collection of glossy, overproduced rhythm-heavy ballads, with synthesizers and electronic drums a-plenty, a solid amount of cavernous echo to give the artist the edge over the listener, and the actual music serving as little more than backing track for the vocal melody. Despite, that is, the plethora of good musicians on the record, including an unduly wasted Max Weinberg on drums, two lead guitar contributions from Eric Clapton (who, frankly speaking, was not in his best shape at the time either), and sax solos from Branford Marsalis and Michael Brecker... not that I'm a big fan of either... well, you are probably beginning to see where this is all heading.

The old charisma is still in place: Carole's voice, with all of its technical flaws, is compensated by being incapable of getting weaker with age, so whether she is singing songs about new love, old love, lost love, found love, or social injustice, she always gets her point across. The problem is that her songwriting techniques have not budged, and she has shown no interest in trying to ap­proach the new technologies creatively — she simply takes these synthesizers and compressed guitars and electronically enhanced drums at face value, as humanity's new default means of making the same old music, and none of her musicians seem interested in directing her towards new shores. So it all just sounds like bland adult contemporary, slightly sweetened by the sound of her ever-lovely voice, but not by any genuine musical hooks.

It's too bad, because there are some potentially strong artistic statements here — I have no idea if ʽLegacyʼ is a farewell ode to Ronald Reagan (both the lyrics and the year 1989 make this a very realistic guess), but she manages to wrestle an unusually high level of intensity out of her voice for the performance, almost bordering on punkish anger, and I'd think the song deserved much more than just a wimpy accompanying acoustic rhythm track and a lax electronic piano solo. The title track, with Clapton on lead guitar, could also have been handled much better: the chorus ("oh city streets, the stories that they tell...") is a touching show of amazement and compassion, but those synthesizers, and even that mid-to-late Eighties tone of Clapton's poor Blackie, as if some­body stuffed the two of them in a sewer pipe... oh, don't get me started.

Overall, if this kind of production does not bother you too much, I'd say that City Streets is worth investigating — if anything, Carole does sound a bit refreshed, and altogether this is much better than either of the albums that bookmark it from both sides of the chronostream. But if you were expecting a comeback along the lines of Paul McCartney or even the Stones (yes, Steel Wheels at least made some musical sense back in 1989), then no, this is not this kind of come­back — not that it was even vaguely possible, considering that Carole's songwriting gift had been sorely depleted already by the mid-Seventies, and also considering her almost total dependence on mainstream production standards. Still, at least the years have not taken any toll on her natural charm, and maybe that's the best thing of all.

Carole King: Speeding Time

CAROLE KING: SPEEDING TIME (1983)

1) Computer Eyes; 2) One Small Voice; 3) Crying In The Rain; 4) Sacred Heart Of Stone; 5) Speeding Time; 6) Standin' On The Borderline; 7) So Ready For Love; 8) Chalice Borealis; 9) Dancing; 10) Alabaster Lady.

The less said about this one, the better. In an almost desperate last attempt to refresh and revita­lize her sound, Carole teams up with Lou Adler, the producer of Tapestry; enlists Goffin to co-write four new songs with her; retains Danny Kortchmar, while at the same time hiring a whole new team of players; and records her own ʽCrying In The Rainʼ, which we mostly knew earlier from the Everly Brothers cover (but apparently, Tammy Wynette had turned it into a hit once again as late as 1981, so Carole probably thought the time was ripe).

And none of this helps, because Speeding Time is a bland, dull, and tired album — more pre­cisely, an album chockful of bland arrangements, dull playing, and reflecting a deeply tired artist. For some reason, Adler must have thought that it was time to move on and adapt, and so, in the place of the somewhat old-style, but generally tasteful arrangements of One To One, we get entire fields of synthesizer weeds and electronic drums, laid out in the nascent adult-contempo­rary style, against which King's echoey vocals have to do battle.

The title of the first track is telling — "Computer eyes / It hurts to tell you I don't really want you", she goes as prompted by Goffin's lyrics, "...don't want to program making love / I like it real and with feeling". Perhaps the plastic bubbling keyboards and the hollow electronic boom of the drums are actually supposed to reinforce the point of the lyrics, but the lyrics are over sooner or later, and the bland production is not. As beautiful a song as ʽCrying In The Rainʼ is in its ori­ginal incarnation, you will have to wait several more years for A-ha to show you how to reinvent it real creatively in the synth-pop era (not to mention that even then, it would hardly have worked without Morten Harket's God-like vocals). This sped-up arrangement with apprentice-level dinky keyboards just cheapens the sentiment.

I suppose that not all the songs are really bad, but the production hackjob sucks all the life out of them anyway. All I can remember is the exact same plastic keyboard texture all over the place; no outstanding work from the rhythm section, no poignant guitar solos, and, of course, this is not what Carole needs for support as a vocalist, as she sounds lost in this electronic pomposity and overwhelmed by studio trickery (which may have seemed dazzling at the time but now just seems rote and dated). The only song where she is able to recover is at the very end — ʽAlabaster Ladyʼ, where the synthesizers give way to a dense set of piano overdubs, and once the song begins to expand and build up, even the electronic additions no longer mar the overall effect. But... it's too late baby now, it's too late. Something inside has died, and it smells.

It is hardly surprising that Speeding Time would be Carole's last album in six years — it was a good thing, I suppose, that she preferred to sit most of the decade out, even if she did not seem all that embarrassed about the record, going on to work with Adler even more on the soundtrack for the 1985 movie Murphy's Romance (I've heard a couple of songs from that, and they are every bit as hopeless as anything on Speeding Time). Still, I love and respect Carole King's legacy way too much to ever grieve about the fact that she did not put out an LP in 1986 or 1987; I do not think it would have merited a stronger thumbs down than this flop (unless she began investing in hair metal or something), but you do have to stop if you're out of inspiration, or if you find your­self in a strange new world of technology about which you do not really care.

Carole King: One To One

CAROLE KING: ONE TO ONE (1982)

1) One To One; 2) It's A War; 3) Lookin' Out For Number One; 4) Life Without Love; 5) Golden Man; 6) Read Between The Lines; 7) Boomerang (Love Is Like A); 8) Goat Annie; 9) Someone You Never Met Before; 10) Little Prince.

In retrospect, this record managed to receive some accolades — largely for its lack of embarras­sing moments, I guess, and a stark adherence to the classic production style of the Seventies: in fact, it is quite notable that not only Danny Kortchmar from her own band returns to play guitar, but even former husband Charles Larkey is back on bass, while at the same time Mark Hallman is retained as both player and co-producer. Furthermore, with her Capitol contract expired, Carole now allies herself with Atlantic Records, and reconnects with both former-former husband Gerry Goffin and with Cynthia Weil for some of the lyrics. I mean, this is as good an arrangement as could ever be thought of for 1982, right?

Well, the album does have a fairly nice sound in the end, but as far as Carole's songwriting form is concerned... not really sure. Too many recycled chord sequences, too few fresh ideas: the title track, for instance, tries to impress us with an unexpectedly cool melodic shift in the middle, but once you understand that the pattern is mostly just taken over from ʽStand By Meʼ, it's just not so cool any more. The single, by the way, was the last time any single from Carole managed to get on the charts (although, granted, she did not put out any singles again until 1989, by which time her old fans had probably readjusted to the modern adult contemporary market).

With a little effort, I could single out ʽIt's A Warʼ as a cut above the average, although the alleged «anger» of its lyrics (Ms. King complains about people being cruel to each other on an everyday basis and about how "people I had never met were out to get me", now who could any of these people be?... oh wait a minute...) does not agree very well with the generally cozy and friendly melody. But at least it has a chorus that is (a) catchy and (b) does not directly rip off any other song I know, and when multiplied by Carol's charisma (she even mentions to sing about her enemies and "people thinking mean" with compassion rather than hatred), that's reason enough for keeping us happy on a record where most other songs, in comparison, sound about as inspired as you'd expect yourself to be merely from looking out of your window on the ten thousandth rainy day of your uneventful life.

I mean, I just cannot help mentioning the amazing coincidence that both Carole King and Cheap Trick put out a song called ʽLookin' Out For Number Oneʼ in precisely the same year of 1982, but apart from that, the only thing I can say about the King song is that it is written in the funk-pop genre, completely inappropriate for Carole's personality (not that the Cheap Trick song was much better, but at least it was more in their usual rocking style). And as much as (not that much) I enjoy the quiet, tepid flow of ʽBoomerang (Love Is Like A)ʼ, I also cannot help mentioning that the idea of love as a boomerang was already polished to pop perfection by ABBA in their ʽBang-A-Boomerangʼ seven years earlier, and they did their best to bring out the ʽboomʼ in the ʽBoom­erangʼ part, whereas Carole's song here might just as well have been called ʽTerrapin (Love Is Like A)ʼ or ʽEndorphin (Love Is Just A)ʼ.

Towards the end, Carole remembers that she used to be a rocker, too, and lets rip with ʽGoat Annieʼ, a blues-pop-rock combo with a «hard» angle and a heart-tearing story about a 75-year old goat herder refusing to let herself be driven off her land — a cool anthem to personal liberty that even Ted Nugent would have appreciated, but not much by way of creative songwriting. Come to think of it, this sounds more like typical Bonnie Raitt material, and should have featured a couple awesome slide guitar solos. Anyway, «rocking Carole» is forgotten fairly quickly, with two un­memorable ballads to finish the album (one of them called ʽLittle Princeʼ, ugh) and an overall impression of... well, just another day in the life. I'd say I get about as excited about this music as I get about the album cover — far be it from me to request a «glamorous» look from Carole, but come on now, she looks like somebody who's never ever left Queens on that photo, even if we all know that she was actually born in Manhattan.

Carole King: Pearls: The Songs Of Goffin And King

CAROLE KING: PEARLS: SONGS OF GOFFIN AND KING (1980)

1) Dancin' With Tears In My Eyes; 2) Locomotion; 3) One Fine Day; 4) Hey Girl; 5) Snow Queen; 6) Chains; 7) Oh No Not My Baby; 8) Hi De Ho; 9) Wasn't Born To Follow; 10) Goin' Back.

Behold, this is a wonderful record — ten amazing songs with nary a single moment of filler, pro­bably the single most consistent and potentially mind-blowing new album produced by Carole since Tapestry, and, in fact, the consolidated power of these songs might even outweigh the collective power of Tapestry. There is a catch, though, and it will be quickly understood with a single glance at the track listing: most of these songs are re-recordings of old classics, written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin in the Sixties for other artists. In other words, a desperate last-minute scramble for a commercial resuscitation — an implicit admittance of the fact that Carole has all but run out of songwriting stamina, and has no other choice but to resort to the cheap trick that forever brands the artist as a «washed-up has-been».

It does serve as an impressive testament to the immeasurable former powers of the Goffin/King duo — after two major flops in a row, Pearls made it all the way up to No. 44, and gave Carole her last success of any importance on the singles chart (in the form of ʽOne Fine Dayʼ, formerly recorded by The Chiffons). Considering that Brill Building material was about as far removed from the trends and fashions of 1980 as Renaissance music, it just goes to show how the best-of-the-best of commercial pop music is capable of transcending all chronological borders — not to mention that it is actually a very nice experience to hear Carole King sing her own song with her own charismatic voice. But ultimately it is still a one-time experience that belongs in 1980, and nothing can alter the status of The Chiffons' version as forever set in stone.

There are almost no attempts here to make the songs significantly different from what they were in the first place — on the contrary, the intention is to capture the original vibe as best as possible, to ensure that nothing gets lost in the attempt to gain something else. ʽLocomotionʼ twists with the same verve as in the Little Eva version; ʽChainsʼ has the same youthful perkiness as the Coo­kies version (maybe even a bit more, what with the sped-up tempo and an accappella take on the first chorus); ʽHi-De-Hoʼ has the same pleasant, lazy, nonchalant attitude as the Blood, Sweat & Tears version; and ʽWasn't Born To Followʼ, with a loud and proud banjo in the lead, has the same mix of earthiness and romanticism as it has in The Byrds' interpretation.

A few of the included songs merit this more than others because their original incarnations may have faded out of memory — ʽHey Girlʼ, for instance, was the only big hit for Freddie Scott; and the stuttering waltz ʽSnow Queenʼ, originally released by Carole for her long-forgotten «The City» project in 1968, is also encountered rather unfrequently, although it is more of an intro­spective and atmospheric tune than a catchy pop hit in essence. And if I understand this correctly, ʽDancing With Tears In My Eyesʼ, opening the album, is actually a new song by the two — an interesting one at that, incorporating bits of disco into what is essentially a very traditionally-ori­ented R&B number and showing that there were at least a few tiny sparks of songwriting left, though not enough to kindle a proper fire. On the other hand, while I totally understand the logic of closing the album with a rendition of ʽGoin' Backʼ ("I think I'm goin' back to the things I learned so well in my youth" — why, sure you are!), I do have to remind everybody that Carole had already recorded this song on her first proper solo album, so it's a bit of overkill.

Anyway, an official thumbs up for this album is impossible — it isn't even live, and nostalgic / customer-baiting re-recordings of classics without at least a reinterpretation angle are the equi­valent of thriving on cheat sheets. The best thing I can say is that the arrangements and the pro­duction are tasteful, and that Carole sounds as if she was having real fun with the idea, rather than just lifelessly sitting it out because somebody else hoisted it on her. But even strict completists should probably first ensure that they have all the originals in their collections before moving on to this palliative record.

Carole King: Touch The Sky

CAROLE KING: TOUCH THE SKY (1979)

1) Time Gone By; 2) Move Lightly; 3) Dreamlike I Wander; 4) Walk With Me (I'll Be Your Companion); 5) Good Mountain People; 6) You Still Want Her; 7) Passing Of The Days; 8) Crazy; 9) Eagle; 10) Seeing Red.

The best thing I can say about Touch The Sky, recorded in the wake of yet another tragedy in Carole's life (Rick Evers' death from overdosing), is that it at least avoids any explicit embarrass­ments like ʽHard Rock Cafeʼ or ʽDisco Techʼ. It is just a plain, normal little record in Carole's usual pop-rock style, alternating between balladry, country-rock, and R&B and about as exciting as having to sit through a musical lesson with an obedient, hard-working, but sparkless student. Without Evers, Carole now once again writes all the music and all the lyrics (I think the last time this happened was on Fantasy), but retains most of the playing team from the previous two al­bums, including her talented guitarist Mark Hallman (but not Robert McEntee). This helps her get a good sound going on, but there's only so much a good sound can do when you're running real low on inspiration — honestly, the album title should have come with a question mark.

The first two tracks on the album were released as singles, probably just because they were the first two tracks — not a single selection could be identified as an obvious highlight. ʽTime Gone Byʼ is a melancholic-optimistic hymn to the past ("I remember time gone by / When peace and hope and dreams were high"), of the grass-was-greener kind, but with keeper-of-the-flame ele­ments as well ("We followed inner visions and touched the sky / Now we who still believe won't let them die"). The sentiment is cute, but melodically, the song is a soft-rock bore, and the chorus, though definitely louder than the verse, does not gather the necessary energy to infect us with Carole's "inner visions" and stuff. ʽMove Lightlyʼ, in contrast, is a «suspenseful» piece of dark R&B, with an ominous atmosphere — grim bassline, spooky snippets of echoey guitars and organs jumping out at you from the shadows; a first for Carole in this department, not too bad, but not really a style that could be seen as fully appropriate for her. Maybe she should have donated the song to the Rolling Stones instead.

Everything else that is at least vaguely memorable usually is so due to the return of pleasant guitar work, whose absence was so much felt on Welcome Home. The barroom rock of ʽGood Mountain Peopleʼ, a weirder-than-weird attempt at a lyrical reconciliation between hippies and hillbillies ("it's quite a sight to see rednecks and longhairs / After years on the opposite sides of the fences" — WHA?...), is made far more tolerable with an excellent, colorfully distorted power-pop guitar tone; and, likewise, the best thing about the power balladry of ʽYou Still Want Herʼ is the beautiful use of sustain on the bluesy guitar solo. Where these instrumental decors are absent, the songs usually just degenerate into banalities, like ʽEagleʼ, a deeply clichéd allegorical story about Freedom and Independence whose intended audience is probably even younger than Really Rosie's, except Carole's lyrics have neither the inventiveness nor the humor of Maurice Sendak, and the melodic background for the song is totally unremarkable.

It helps at least that there are quite a few upbeat, toe-tappy numbers here, because with one un­terminable ballad after another the results would have been completely untolerable — as it is, we at least have stuff like the generic country-rocker ʽPassing Of The Daysʼ and the generic pop-rocker ʽCrazyʼ that increase the simple fun factor without cheapening the proceedings any farther than they have already been cheapened. This all makes for a record that is perfectly listenable, if also perfectly forgettable afterwards — at least, if you're really running short on inspiration, try to make a good uninspired mix of various styles, which is a lesson that was not learnt either on Rhymes & Reasons or Thoroughbred. But no, I am not recommending this for anybody except for completists or strange sophisticated lovers of Mark Hallman's guitar playing.

Carole King: Welcome Home

CAROLE KING: WELCOME HOME (1978)

1) Main Street Saturday Night; 2) Sun Bird; 3) Venusian Diamond; 4) Changes; 5) Morning Sun; 6) Disco Tech; 7) Wings Of Love; 8) Ride The Music; 9) Everybody's Got The Spirit; 10) Welcome Home.

Okay, now this is an album that can hardly be saved by even the most objective and unprejudiced analysis. Even if it was produced by pretty much the same team (including the same couple of guitarists, although husband Rick Evers is only credited for cowbell this time — given his drug problems, this somehow does not look surprising), Welcome Home seems to take everything about Simple Things that was problematic (weak hooks, banal lyrics, generally unimaginative arrangements), discard everything that was good (such as classy guitar solos and progressive ambition on songs like ʽOneʼ), and throw in a few additional problems — most importantly, copycatting, as Carole now seems almost resigned to «follow where you lead», even if that makes her sound like a laughable third-rate imitator at times.

Clearly the greatest embarrassment, and one of the worst ever experiences in King's catalog, is ʽDisco Techʼ — the title alone should be enough to die on the spot from an overdose of bad taste, but, yes indeed, this is Carole King going disco, heavily laying on all the clichés of the genre. Considering that Carole King and funk are about as compatible as Shostakovich and hip-hop, lyrics with lines like "rhythm is our way of communication, you won't ever want to take a vaca­tion" (Mike Love, eat your heart out!), and especially "Disco Tech — let me be your teacher!" (no thank you), simply point out the sad fact that, as generally lovable and talented Carole King is as a human being and an artist, she is a bit lacking in the basic intelligence department: even in the sweaty disco climate of 1978, with everybody losing their heads and all, this song could not pass even the lower rungs of the quality test for Whiteboy (Whitegirl) Disco Fodder.

And, unfortunately, that ain't all. On a less overtly embarrassing, but still highly disappointing note, a song like ʽEverybody's Got The Spiritʼ seems clearly copped from Fleet­wood Mac's ʽDon't Stopʼ, from the basic rhythm pattern to the fade-in build-up of the introduction to the friendly anthemic chorus — except that it is much weaker in every respect, be it the lyrics, the thin arrangement, the lack of energy, and a complete misunderstanding of the ascending melodic pattern that made ʽDon't Stopʼ so great, as it captured the listener's spirit and pulled it upwards along the melodic stairway. In the place of the invigorating "don't stop thinking about tomorrow", we here have "everybody's got the spirit, yeah you know what I mean" (do we?), delivered in such a way that it seems clear that the only person who's really got the spirit is Carole herself, and even she might be just faking it, too.

Other «highlights» include ʽVenusian Diamondʼ, an oddly «psychedelic» song with Vocoder-treated vocals, circa-1966-Beatles vocal harmonies, two sections that make a transition from slow, lazy, Lennonesque psychedelia to bouncy McCartney-style pop, and sitars a-plenty — the best thing about the song is that it at least does not try to adapt to contemporary trends, and is not as openly annoying as the previously listed two, but it does show that retro psychedelia is no more Carole's forte as is disco music; and two ballad collaborations with Rick Evers — ʽSun Birdʼ (is this, too, inspired by Fleetwood Mac's ʽSongbirdʼ, by any chance?) and ʽWings Of Loveʼ, featuring some of the most inane lyrics of Carole's entire career ("You fill me with love I can give / You fill me with life I can live / You fill me with song I can sing / And truth that makes the kingdom ring" — did they make a journey through time to the 21st century to have a computer write that for them?).

Ultimately, the only song here that rises half an inch above mediocrity would be the album opener ʽMain Street Saturday Nightʼ, a simple pop-rocker with the only example of good lead guitar work on the album and a tiny bit of vocal grit that sounds authentic. Other than that, just about everything is a heavy letdown, and it honestly seems that with Simple Things, Carole was on a positive roll, but less than one year later, she was once again in full turbulence, probably more busy with her (once again) deteriorating family life than with making good music: unlike the aforementioned Fleetwood Mac, who could find artistic inspiration in their troubles by pulling them out in public and perversely feasting on them, Carole always seemed to value her social role of Good Mood Muse, stubbornly stuffing her problems inside of her or only vaguely hinting at them in the good-time melodies she wrote — and with Welcome Home, it feels quite strongly that she is not being honest with us at all, producing insincere, underwritten fodder with no direc­tion whatsoever. Is it any wonder, then, that where Simple Things still went to No. 17 on the charts, Welcome Home did not even make it into the top hundred? No wonder at all. At least with such weak records as Rhymes & Reasons and Thoroughbred, we could hardly doubt the sincerity of the writer's motives: Welcome Home is the first genuinely rotten artifact in the writer's history, reason enough for a rather vicious thumbs down.

Carole King: Simple Things

CAROLE KING: SIMPLE THINGS (1977)

1) Simple Things; 2) Hold On; 3) In The Name Of Love; 4) Labyrinth; 5) You're The One; 6) Hard Rock Cafe; 7) Time Alone; 8) God Only Knows; 9) To Know That I Love You; 10) One.

The start of an era: Carole's first album for Avatar Records, with a completely new team of musicians and a seriously different sound, even if, from the very first track, it is quite obvious that most of the change has been external and superficial. Her voice and piano, fortunately, are still at the core of the sound, but on the whole, the arrangements become tougher and more elec­tric: strings and horns are still in, but acoustic guitars are mostly out, largely because of Carole's new partner, Rick Evers, who sort of steered her in a slightly heavier direction.

Critical reception for Simple Things was frigid at best: common consensus seemed to imply that Carole King had become a stubborn dinosaur, refusing to evolve and adapt to the times — alle­gedly, Rolling Stone dubbed it «the worst album of 1977» (with Kansas and Uriah Heep still on the prowl? you sure ain't no gentleman, Mr. Wenner!), and the bad reputation still persists, seeing as how all of Carole King's pre-Avatar record catalog still remains in print, whereas some of those later albums seem to have never even been released in CD format. Indeed, like most of the American soft-rockers of the first half of the decade, Carole was in trouble — it would have been very hard to imagine her as a disco dancer, let alone a punk rocker, and her natural shyness and reclusiveness was becoming less and less convenient in an epoch that was placing more and more emphasis on flashiness and visual imagery. In a way, it is quite amazing that she still had enough credit left for the album to go gold, by pure inertia...

...especially if you also take into consideration the arch-ridiculous decision to take the worst track off it and release it as a single. See, not only does Carole King have no business writing a track called ʽHard Rock Cafeʼ — a bit like seeing Judas Priest at the local Renaissance Fair — but even if it is just business and she was paid by the Hard Rock Cafe for promotion or something, why write and arrange it like a friggin' mariachi band number? All of a sudden, in the middle of this still very personal and intimate bunch of ballads and soft-rockers, you get the artificially «happy» and utterly generic atmosphere of a banal carnival. As a corny B-side outtake or a publicity jingle, it would be okay, but as the first public announcement of The New Carole King, it was a highly predictable embarrassment, a serious lapse of taste that could only alienate the critical community — most of the members of which were far too busy in 1977, anyway, to listen to a new Carole King album from top to bottom.

Which is too bad, since there are at least some good songs here, and overall, I would consider it a significant improvement over the consistent mediocrity of Thoroughbred — on the first go, at least, the change of creative environment did Carole some good. First and foremost, we gotta give some credit to the guitar players — particularly Robert McEntee and Mark Hallman (I am not sure how much credit should be actually given to Rick Evers, who is co-credited on three songs with Carole and also listed as a guitar player). On two of the album's most uptempo numbers, the guitars kick up a real storm. ʽYou're The Oneʼ is a dark and melancholic song, a little reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac's ʽYou Make Loving Funʼ in terms of tempo, basic rhythmic structure, and the impact that the sharp, intrusive guitar licks make on the rest of the song — but this one's more disturbing and, at times, even more desperate, in strange contrast with Carole's former peace of mind. The other number is ʽGod Only Knowsʼ — not a cover of the Beach Boys song, but a completely different and, this time, bouncy and uplifting song, with a ʽRunawayʼ-ish "I wonder..." hook.

Both songs are decent as far as composing goes, but the real reason I am singling them out is that both are extended with an unusually long (for Carole) coda, where the guitarists are given complete freedom, and they are not afraid to use it. On ʽYou're The Oneʼ, the two players battle each other, contrasting a sharp, shrill tone with one muffled by a talkbox effect; and on ʽGod Only Knowsʼ, one of the soloists (no idea who exactly) delivers a fluent, super-melodic blues-pop solo that Dickey Betts might have envied. Really, this marks a first — never before did Carole allow her supporting players to carry on with their guitar solos for so long, and she couldn't have chosen a better opportunity to start: the electric guitar on both these songs is as perfect a companion for her and her piano as the sax solo was on ʽJazzmanʼ.

As for the less guitar-dependent songs, I'd say that the title track is quite lovely, despite the unnecessary overreliance on synthesizers, and gets its programmatic message ("simple things mean a lot to me") across quite convincingly. Little else stands out (although, other than the abys­mal ʽHard Rock Cafeʼ, little else is openly irritating), until she gets to the very end and delivers one of the most ambitious songs she ever wrote: ʽOneʼ is a micro-macro-cosmic anthem that somehow manages, over a measly five minutes, to touch upon everything, using the magic num­ber as a starting point — a song about being "one" as a person, as a family unit, and as "one" with the universe, and about all the emotions that go with it, from joy and amazement to bewilder­ment and confusion (the pertinent refrain is "what am I gonna do?... what am I gonna do?..") Perhaps it is far from her best in sheer melodic terms (although I really like the structural games she plays with the bridge section, going from super-quiet "I am one" to super-loud "WE ARE ONE!"), but it really pays off to see her combine deep personal honesty and vulnerability with sonic bombast in this manner, and in any case, it's a fresh approach to finalizing the album, after three nice, but generic-predictable straightforwardly optimistic codas in a row — this time, the ending is more ambiguous and intriguing.

Bottomline is, the critics were wrong: in a world that does not necessarily expect each and every one of its master songwriters to adapt to new trends, but allows them to follow their own path of spiritual and artistic evolution, Simple Things should have been as welcome as any other B-level Carole King album, and it does have more high points than either Rhymes & Reasons or Thoroughbred, to name but a couple of truly middle-of-the-road albums for her. I am not sure that three very good songs (two of them mostly because of the guitar work), one awful song, and 5-6 unremarkable tunes are really worthy of a thumbs up, but don't let me discourage you from trying the record out anyway — if you see it in a corner, give it a spin, just to be assured that as late as 1977, Carole King did not betray and abandon her muse, even if she still left her going around somewhat underfed and unwashed behind the ears.

Carole King: Thoroughbred

CAROLE KING: THOROUGHBRED (1975)

1) So Many Ways; 2) Daughter Of Light; 3) High Out Of Time; 4) Only Love Is Real; 5) There's A Space Between Us; 6) I'd Like To Know You Better; 7) We All Have To Be Alone; 8) Ambrosia; 9) Still Here Thinking Of You; 10) It's Gonna Work Out Fine.

The end of an era: Carole's last album for Ode Records, last album produced by Lou Adler and the last one to reflect precisely the same old, sunnily conservative production stylistics, associated with Carole's house band (Kortchmar et al.), as well as Crosby & Nash (both of whom appear here as background vocalists), James Taylor (who also appears here as background vocalist), and riding a thoroughbred horse on the beach without a care in the world. Which does not mean that there actually were no cares in the world — husband Charles Larkey, woe and alas, is no longer credited as the resident bass player (replaced by Leland Sklar), because of domestic troubles that were tearing the house apart.

Instead, however, of going the easy way and converting domestic problems into tempestuous art, Carole went the hard way and preferred to make another sunny album — this was, after all, what the people expected of her. And now that she was no longer bound by the catchiness parameter (grown-ups can stand hookless, after all — you can't fool the kids, but you can work your way around the grown-ups), the result, once again, is disappointing. There is virtually nothing about Thoroughbred, bar Carole's usual ability to come across as friendly and likeable, to make it stand out — like Rhymes & Reasons, this is just an okay collection of mediocre ballads and smooth, formulaic pop-rockers.

"So many ways, so many ways to show you love someone" — a promising start, perhaps, but just one question: where are these many ways? The only way I hear is a piano ballad that rides the same chords we have already heard a hundred times, and the worst way possible to present it, when the transition from verse to chorus is marked only by a surge in volume, nothing else. And even worse than that, there are signs of fakery aboard: on the closing number, ʽIt's Gonna Work Out Fineʼ, she sings: "We've been hurting each other through a hard time / And it's a mighty good feeling to know it's gonna work out fine" — the entire song rings as untrue as the combination of these two lines: if you've really been hurting each other, how the heck do you even begin to get the feeling that "it's gonna work out fine" (and it really won't)? She tries hard — yes, she even delays the resolution of the second line, turning it into a climactic outburst, with some heavy artil­lery thrown in in the form of an uplifting brass riff. It does not help: the song is formally positive, but hardly the strong uplifting jolt that is needed to convince the listener.

Of all the songs here, I can vouch safely only for one — ʽAmbrosiaʼ, with lyrics by Dave Palmer, has a certain stately majesty, coupled with melancholy and nostalgia. There's nothing particularly outstanding about its melody, but there's a sort of mix between gospel-soul and country-pop here that tugs at heartstrings which none of the other songs manage to irritate. Repeated listens show that the whole thing is not hopeless (there are at least some attempts to produce memorable pop phrasing on numbers like ʽDaughter Of Lightʼ and ʽWe All Have To Be Aloneʼ), but most likely, by the time you get used to the very subtle nuances that distinguish these tunes from one another, you will already have completely lost interest. Yes, ʽHigh Out Of Timeʼ does sound a lot like Crosby & Nash, not the least because Crosby & Nash sing background vocals, but in basic musi­cal terms this is a non-entity — like a deconstructed ʽLong And Winding Roadʼ, devoid of its genius musical decisions and turned into slow background balladry muzak. And it's even more painful to listen to something like ʽOnly Love Is Realʼ start out with almost the same melody and atmosphere as ʽIt's Too Lateʼ, only to realize a few bars later that it has none of that awesome contrast between the ominous verse and the angry-sad chorus.

In short, while not an embarrassing disaster, Thoroughbred is a serious disappointment after the previous two records: Wrap Around Joy had given us a promising transformation into a jazz-pop hookmeister (even with a few glam elements thrown in for good measure), Really Rosie proved once and for all that «inborn pop instinct» is a reality that requires at least a lobotomy to go away completely, but with this album, she once again tried to put «substance» before «form», and, honestly, Carole King is not the deepest or the most unusual thinking artist in existence, so her falling back on the thrice recycled formula of Tapestry was doomed from the start. The album did chart for a while, but the formula had clearly run out of gas, as, for that matter, did almost the entire sunny Californian style by the end of 1975. And even if the record is still much better than Carole's post-Ode output on the average, I do not see myself revisiting it any time in the future — cut out ʽAmbrosiaʼ, perhaps, and leave the rest of this «thoroughbred»'s carcass to the dogs, with a decisive thumbs down.

Carole King: Really Rosie

CAROLE KING: REALLY ROSIE (1975)

1) Really Rosie; 2) One Was Johnny; 3) Alligators All Around; 4) Pierre; 5) Screaming And Yelling; 6) The Ballad Of Chicken Soup; 7) Chicken Soup With Rice; 8) Avenue P; 9) My Simple Humble Neighborhood; 10) The Awful Truth; 11) Such Sufferin'; 12) Really Rosie (reprise).

Not having had the honor of growing up as a kid (or growing kids as a parent) in mid-Sixties America, I have missed the opportunity to become closely acquainted with the work of Maurice Sendak — however, as far as I can see, at least the verse part of his picture books (The Nutshell Library series) was fairly faithfully adapted by Carole King, and the lyrics are pretty cool: at the expense of being perhaps a bit too complicated for the average toddler, they have «family enter­tainment» value in that they may engage both kids and adults, and, of course, they have that «unsettling», «dark» angle that is so much all the rage today, as long as a particular author of children's literature wants to get a pat on the back from sophisticated critics and readers.

But truth be told, there's really no denying the talent of the writer, and it's twice as awesome that a melody writer as talented as Carole King agreed to put some of those lyrics to music. It may have been quite natural, too, seeing as how she had kids of her own who probably were growing up on that stuff (in fact, daughters Louise and Sherry are here in person, providing backup vocals throughout), and, as a progressive mother who is not afraid of a little bit of scary imagery, she herself is totally getting into the spirit of the thing. More importantly, it provides her with a great opportunity to get away from the too overtly mellow, wishy-washy structure of her emotional balladry and concentrate almost exclusively on those pop hooks that had pretty much died out after Tapestry (although Wrap Around Joy wasn't too bad in that respect).

The proper way to do this, actually, is (a) keep the tunes as snappy and upbeat as possible and (b) keep the arrangements to a minimum — most of the time, it's just a piano-bass-drums trio, with husband Charles Larkey and Andy Newmark keeping up the beat. In a few cases, there's also some guitar, usually in the appropriate contexts — for instance, ʽThe Awful Truthʼ, where the protagonist discusses her chances at "playing Mrs. Dracula", is accompanied by some histrionic distorted electric soloing; and, curiously, Carole herself is credited as the only guitar player on the album, so it's somewhat hilarious to think that her first experience playing distorted electric guitar may have taken place on an album for kiddies.

Anyway, if your toddler likes the books, he or she would probably be happy to recite the alphabet in the ʽAlligators All Aroundʼ order, empathizing with the I-don't-caring Pierre and the lion who had to eat him in order to cure him from an annoying attitude, crying at the terrible fate of Chicken Soup (Carole gets into this one with a particularly theatrical flavor, with probably her wildest bit of screaming ever captured on record), or learning the differences between the twelve months of the year, all of which have only one thing in common — ʽChicken Soup With Riceʼ. And if you are the parent of that toddler, you might (brushes sentimental tear off face) be happy yourself to provide him or her with that entertainment. Besides, if you just stick to the books, you'll never be able to recite them as effectively as Carole, so, you know, better leave it to the professionals.

No, honestly, it's not one of those rare records that «masquerades» as a children-oriented piece of entertainment, while at the same time containing hidden depth — Really Rosie is purely shallow fun-oriented stuff. But it is infested with Carole King charisma from top to bottom, and when the charisma is combined with a clever mix of cuddliness, sentimentality, humor, and macabre spoo­kiness... well, the overall result is far more enjoyable on a gut level, even for an adult, than quite a few «dead serious» albums in my memory. So, thumbs up: my only complaint is that it will now take at least a couple of weeks for my brain to clear out that "chicken soup, chicken soup, chicken soup with RIIIICE!" bit. Particularly painful, that one, given how much I hate the very idea of chicken soup with rice. (For a change, try humming "chicken soup with mice" or "chicken soup with lice" instead — I assure you that it won't spoil the spirit of the book or of the musical one little bit).