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.
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