Song Lyric of the Day (Carole King, on Friends, ‘Winter Spring Summer or Fall’)

“Winter spring summer or fall,
Hey now, all you've got to do is call.
Lord, I'll be there, yes I will.
You've got a friend.”—Carole King, “You’ve Got a Friend,” from her Tapestry LP (1971)

Throughout the 1970s, when I was either learning to drive or just before, it seemed that the best music in the world came through a car radio. Especially in the summer of 1971, one song insinuated its way into my tween consciousness—first slowly, softly, then achingly trying to balance a young love versus one that had died. The lyrics of “It’s Too Late” seemed so sophisticated, so adult, so like that cool Tom Scott sax solo in the instrumental break, but they couldn’t overcome the piano chords as persistent as the hurt in the voice of the song’s composer.

Like a good friend, the music of Carole King—who, hard to believe, turns 70 today—helps one endure the seasons of hurt and love, harsh as well as gentle. If you can imagine a granola earth mother, the one authentic link between the Brill Building group of songwriters (King, onetime hubby and lyricist Gerry Goffin, Neil Sedaka, Burt Bacharach, and Neil Diamond) and the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s, that person is unquestionably King.

“You’ve Got a Friend,” from the same Tapestry album that spawned “It’s Too Late,” was “as close to pure inspiration as I’ve experienced,” King later told Paul Zollo, in an interview collected in his Songwriters On Songwriting. “The song wrote itself. It was written by something outside of myself through me.”

The song became a hit for King’s great good friend, James Taylor. If you ask me to pick between King’s and JT’s versions, King’s would win, but just barely. But as for “Up on the Roof,” his cover of her earlier hit—well, I guess it evens out. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday gift than seeing Taylor perform this at the then-Garden State Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., in the mid-1980s.

Before she wrote songs for herself, King (and Goffin) created them for others in the 1960s. I could go on and on about who performed which King song, but I’ll just pick out a couple more favorites here: Dave Mason’s 1978 cover of the Shirelle’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” (another I saw in concert, this time in Central Park) and one which I wish I’d seen, but which I fell rapturously in love with every which way the second I first heard it: “Up on the Roof,” performed by Bruce Springsteen in the mid-70s with all the rawness and hunger that made so many of us worship him for life (which you can hear—unfortunately, not seen—in this YouTube version.) It added a whole new level of magic to the song that first became a hit for the Drifters in late 1962.