Rolling Stone has just updated it’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and so I thought for our new series that I would be bring you the Top 25 acording to the this new list. They compiled the new list by receiving and tabulating ‘Top 50 Albums’ lists from more than 300 artists, producers, critics and music industry figures.
25. Carole King ‘Tapestry’ (1971)
For a decade, Carole King wrote pop songs with her then-husband, Gerry Goffin: hits such as Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” (Eva Boyd was the couple’s babysitter) and the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” Then King’s friend James Taylor encouraged her to sing her own tunes. “He just made it look so easy,” she recalled. “So I did Tapestry in the same spirit.”
She slowed down “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” (originally a hit for the Shirelles in 1961), with Taylor and Joni Mitchell on background vocals, heightening the melancholy inside, while her warm, earnest singing brought out the sadness in “It’s Too Late” and the earthy joy on “I Feel the Earth Move.”
As King later recalled, “I wasn’t in the same league vocally with Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Barbara Streisand. But I knew how to convey the mood and emotion of a song with honest, straight-from-the-heart interpretation.” The resulting collection of songs saw King remake herself as an artist and became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, creating the reigning model for the 1970s female singer-songwriter.
It received four Grammy Awards in 1972, including Album of the Year. The lead singles from the album—”It’s Too Late” and “I Feel the Earth Move”—spent five weeks at number one on both the Billboard and Easy Listening Charts. Tapestry has been certified 13× Platinum by the RIAA in the US, and has sold an estimated 25 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best selling albums of all time.
