Carole King’s Tapestry (2021)

Loren Glass is an English professor at the University of Iowa. Born approximately in the ‘60s he came to Carole King and Tapestry by way of hippie parents and stepparents. I think his appreciations are sincere but they felt a little too pious for my taste. He does a good job of locating King and the album within their contexts, rock ‘n’ roll close to the moment it became rock and of course the singer-songwriter tradition and feminism. Some things I hadn’t really known before: Carole King was born Carol Klein, and Tapestry is her third solo album, following her flight to the West Coast from New York in the ‘60s. I’ve never known those first two albums. Though Glass has ties to rock critics such as Ann Powers, for better or worse he has little of the spirit. Admittedly the spirit can often be loud-mouthed braying. But I felt Glass was circumspect and respectful to a fault. On the other hand it may be the best way to approach the album. It’s a favorite of mine (and a million others) for various personal reasons. I still consider “It’s Too Late” one of the greatest pop songs ever made. My biggest complaint about this 33-1/3 volume is that it overdoes the footnotes—nearly 200 of them, usually bare citations, and often not useful. This is not the first 33-1/3 I’ve seen with citations, but Glass may have set the record for sheer numbers. I’m just too easily distracted by them in this form, too inured to the chatty kind that has something to add. My favorite section was “Trilogy,” covering King’s first three solo albums, which she later called a trilogy. It’s a nice way of ambling into Tapestry itself and Glass provides a very neat analysis. He also—as one must—addresses her background as one of the great Brill Building songwriters of the early ‘60s. There’s a reason Glass is so solemn—King is genuinely a giant of the music industry, a rock ‘n’ roll and rock icon, and a singer-songwriter iconoclast out of Laurel Canyon. After more than 50 years she is still daunting to consider. I wish more of Glass’s passion came through and less of his inhibitions, but it’s still a useful primer on King and her greatest album. His best geeky rock critic point is about the “Album Era” of rock and the place of Tapestry in it. He dates this Album Era as from 1965 to 1975. I could quibble, but fair enough!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.