“Tapestry” contains songs that can unleash a woman’s most independent desires, and ones that also reveal King’s deep devotion to and reliance on the men in her life. She wrote the music to the iconic “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” then went out to play canasta that night with her mother’s friends.
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The documentary traces that evolution with lovely vignettes and testimonies, showing how her talent and professional ambitions sat uneasily beside her suburban conventionality. King wasn’t just a natural woman she was a complicated one, born and nurtured in one gendered environment and leading the way to another, more egalitarian one. Whether that’s the fault of the filmmakers or an edict from King herself, we don’t know. More troubling, the two youngest of her four children are mentioned so quickly that I missed it the first time I watched the film, and they’re never pictured. One of King’s four husbands is not even named. Or the glimpses of her and Goffin hunched over the piano during their incredibly prolific partnership.īut the task of compressing a long career narrative into a television-size documentary results in odd choices of what to leave in and leave out, especially on the personal side. Or the captivating footage from an interview with King in what appears to be her home in Idaho - there’s no date or place mentioned - where she enthusiastically plays a sweeping grand piano, her face freckled, her long, frizzy hair swaying with her voice. The charm lies in the home movies where a four-year-old Carol is playing the piano, her hair in bows and braids, her chubby fingers already comfortable on the keyboard. The documentary chronicles her story in ways that are charming and inspiring, if occasionally frustrating. She has also become an environmental activist on behalf of her adopted state of Idaho, discovering in the northern Rockies the physical beauty and spiritual respite that eluded her in New York and California.Ĭarole King and the Obamas applaud at the Kennedy Center Honors in December. Now 74, she toured with James Taylor just a few years ago (an amazing performance) and gets to see her name in lights on Broadway thanks to “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in 2014 (I’ve seen “Beautiful” twice). King’s career as a singer-songwriter is unparalleled: She’s won four Grammys, a Kennedy Center honor and is the first woman to receive the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. It’s since sold more than 25 million copies worldwide and is one of the best-selling albums of all time. In the documentary, producer Lou Adler says that the album took three weeks to make and cost all of $22,000. Her landmark solo album “Tapestry” was released 45 years ago this month. She not only gave us a musical reflection of our deepest joys, anxieties and desires, she also blazed a remarkable trail from suburban housewife to superstar that I, for one, only now fully appreciate. Her songs spoke to me wherever I was emotionally at the time - when I needed a friend, when my boyfriend was so far away, when I longed to feel like a natural woman.īut only now do I realize that her songs, especially when she performed them in her own authentic, unpolished voice, were speaking to waves of women who had never been spoken to in quite this way before. For me, like so very many others, King’s music provided the soundtrack to my youth. Watching this glimpse into her upbringing ignited a minor revelation. “We were all brought up to be cute to marry the nice boy who’s gonna make a lot of money,” she recalls.