Introduction

ONE TO ONE (1982)
1) One To One; 2) It's A War; 3) Lookin' Out For Number One; 4) Life Without Love; 5) Golden Man; 6) Read Between The Lines; 7) Boomerang (Love Is Like A); 8) Goat Annie; 9) Someone You Never Met Before; 10) Little Prince.
In retrospect, this record managed to receive some accolades — largely for its lack of embarras­sing moments, I guess, and a stark adherence to the classic production style of the Seventies: in fact, it is quite notable that not only Danny Kortchmar from her own band returns to play guitar, but even former husband Charles Larkey is back on bass, while at the same time Mark Hallman is retained as both player and co-producer. Furthermore, with her Capitol contract expired, Carole now allies herself with Atlantic Records, and reconnects with both former-former husband Gerry Goffin and with Cynthia Weil for some of the lyrics. I mean, this is as good an arrangement as could ever be thought of for 1982, right?
Well, the album does have a fairly nice sound in the end, but as far as Carole's songwriting form is concerned... not really sure. Too many recycled chord sequences, too few fresh ideas: the title track, for instance, tries to impress us with an unexpectedly cool melodic shift in the middle, but once you understand that the pattern is mostly just taken over from ʽStand By Meʼ, it's just not so cool any more. The single, by the way, was the last time any single from Carole managed to get on the charts (although, granted, she did not put out any singles again until 1989, by which time her old fans had probably readjusted to the modern adult contemporary market).
With a little effort, I could single out ʽIt's A Warʼ as a cut above the average, although the alleged «anger» of its lyrics (Ms. King complains about people being cruel to each other on an everyday basis and about how "people I had never met were out to get me", now who could any of these people be?... oh wait a minute...) does not agree very well with the generally cozy and friendly melody. But at least it has a chorus that is (a) catchy and (b) does not directly rip off any other song I know, and when multiplied by Carol's charisma (she even mentions to sing about her enemies and "people thinking mean" with compassion rather than hatred), that's reason enough for keeping us happy on a record where most other songs, in comparison, sound about as inspired as you'd expect yourself to be merely from looking out of your window on the ten thousandth rainy day of your uneventful life.
I mean, I just cannot help mentioning the amazing coincidence that both Carole King and Cheap Trick put out a song called ʽLookin' Out For Number Oneʼ in precisely the same year of 1982, but apart from that, the only thing I can say about the King song is that it is written in the funk-pop genre, completely inappropriate for Carole's personality (not that the Cheap Trick song was much better, but at least it was more in their usual rocking style). And as much as (not that much) I enjoy the quiet, tepid flow of ʽBoomerang (Love Is Like A)ʼ, I also cannot help mentioning that the idea of love as a boomerang was already polished to pop perfection by ABBA in their ʽBang-A-Boomerangʼ seven years earlier, and they did their best to bring out the ʽboomʼ in the ʽBoom­erangʼ part, whereas Carole's song here might just as well have been called ʽTerrapin (Love Is Like A)ʼ or ʽEndorphin (Love Is Just A)ʼ.
Towards the end, Carole remembers that she used to be a rocker, too, and lets rip with ʽGoat Annieʼ, a blues-pop-rock combo with a «hard» angle and a heart-tearing story about a 75-year old goat herder refusing to let herself be driven off her land — a cool anthem to personal liberty that even Ted Nugent would have appreciated, but not much by way of creative songwriting. Come to think of it, this sounds more like typical Bonnie Raitt material, and should have featured a couple awesome slide guitar solos. Anyway, «rocking Carole» is forgotten fairly quickly, with two un­memorable ballads to finish the album (one of them called ʽLittle Princeʼ, ugh) and an overall impression of... well, just another day in the life. I'd say I get about as excited about this music as I get about the album cover — far be it from me to request a «glamorous» look from Carole, but come on now, she looks like somebody who's never ever left Queens on that photo, even if we all know that she was actually born in Manhattan.
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.
CITY STREETS (1989)
1) City Streets; 2) Sweet Life; 3) Down To The Darkness; 4) Lovelight; 5) I Can't Stop Thinking About You; 6) Legacy; 7) Ain't That The Way; 8) Midnight Flyer; 9) Homeless Heart; 10) Someone Who Believes In You.
A six-year break from a hitherto diligent recording career meant that, by the grace of God above and lenience of Devil below, we have been deprived of that one «1986 Carole King album», with guest appearances by Rod Stewart and Jon Bon Jovi, six songs co-written with Desmond Child and Diane Warren, and produced by Phil Collins, that could have been the final agonizing scream of her reputation. Instead, she preferred to go for a (barely noticeable) acting career for a while, and remain in seclusion until her muse came rapping at the door.
And so, in the place of a hideously awful synth-pop album from 1986, we get a pleasantly boring adult contemporary album in 1989. Co-produced by Carole herself and a little-known guitarist called Rudy Guess (who would later support Carole on some of her tours and passed away in 2010), City Streets is... well, probably what you'd expect a 1989 Carole King album to be: a cozy collection of glossy, overproduced rhythm-heavy ballads, with synthesizers and electronic drums a-plenty, a solid amount of cavernous echo to give the artist the edge over the listener, and the actual music serving as little more than backing track for the vocal melody. Despite, that is, the plethora of good musicians on the record, including an unduly wasted Max Weinberg on drums, two lead guitar contributions from Eric Clapton (who, frankly speaking, was not in his best shape at the time either), and sax solos from Branford Marsalis and Michael Brecker... not that I'm a big fan of either... well, you are probably beginning to see where this is all heading.
The old charisma is still in place: Carole's voice, with all of its technical flaws, is compensated by being incapable of getting weaker with age, so whether she is singing songs about new love, old love, lost love, found love, or social injustice, she always gets her point across. The problem is that her songwriting techniques have not budged, and she has shown no interest in trying to ap­proach the new technologies creatively — she simply takes these synthesizers and compressed guitars and electronically enhanced drums at face value, as humanity's new default means of making the same old music, and none of her musicians seem interested in directing her towards new shores. So it all just sounds like bland adult contemporary, slightly sweetened by the sound of her ever-lovely voice, but not by any genuine musical hooks.
It's too bad, because there are some potentially strong artistic statements here — I have no idea if ʽLegacyʼ is a farewell ode to Ronald Reagan (both the lyrics and the year 1989 make this a very realistic guess), but she manages to wrestle an unusually high level of intensity out of her voice for the performance, almost bordering on punkish anger, and I'd think the song deserved much more than just a wimpy accompanying acoustic rhythm track and a lax electronic piano solo. The title track, with Clapton on lead guitar, could also have been handled much better: the chorus ("oh city streets, the stories that they tell...") is a touching show of amazement and compassion, but those synthesizers, and even that mid-to-late Eighties tone of Clapton's poor Blackie, as if some­body stuffed the two of them in a sewer pipe... oh, don't get me started.
Overall, if this kind of production does not bother you too much, I'd say that City Streets is worth investigating — if anything, Carole does sound a bit refreshed, and altogether this is much better than either of the albums that bookmark it from both sides of the chronostream. But if you were expecting a comeback along the lines of Paul McCartney or even the Stones (yes, Steel Wheels at least made some musical sense back in 1989), then no, this is not this kind of come­back — not that it was even vaguely possible, considering that Carole's songwriting gift had been sorely depleted already by the mid-Seventies, and also considering her almost total dependence on mainstream production standards. Still, at least the years have not taken any toll on her natural charm, and maybe that's the best thing of all.
COLOUR OF YOUR DREAMS (1993)
1) Lay Down My Life; 2) Hold Out For Love; 3) Standing In The Rain; 4) Now And Forever; 5) Wishful Thinking; 6) Colour Of Your Dreams; 7) Tears Falling Down On Me; 8) Friday's Tie-Dye Nightmare; 9) Just One Thing; 10) Do You Feel Love; 11) It's Never Too Late.
This is quite a sad story, really. The early Nineties saw plenty of (at least temporary) comebacks by veterans, revitalized by the general «shredding of the excesses» of the previous decade — and one could have sincerely hoped that Carole King could fall in that category. Unfortunately, it did not happen: Colour Of Your Dreams (yes, the full British spelling is quite explicit on the cover) is about as inspiring and coloUrful as its album cover, which, like City Streets, seems to be making yet another point of Carole as «tough street girl», sort of the female equivalent of Bruce Springsteen in his «tough street guy» incarnation. But it looks fake and cheap, and so does the overall style of the songs.
Bad news arrive immediately — the first five seconds of the record, when a few seemingly Casio chords boink against a thin cobweb of cheap drum machine beats, may be enough to turn you off immediately, «now and forever», to quote one of the song titles. And while it does get better than that eventually, this is still a true sign that production issues have not been normalized — much of the record remains inescapably stuck in plastic adult contemporary mode (no surprise, really, considering that Rudy Guess is retained as co-producer from last time). In 1983 or even 1989, this could have merely meant yielding to fashionable pressure; alas, in 1993 this means that the artist is not sensing any problem with such an approach, and what could be technically forgiven several years back (horrible production back then could still somehow agree with decent melodies, see Fleetwood Mac's Tango In The Night, for instance), is now a crime against humanity.
Not that the record is particularly lazy or anything. Carole tries her hand at several different styles, alternating between quiet piano ballads (or synth ballads), loud idealistic anthems (ʽHold Out For Loveʼ, with Mr. Slash himself making a guest appearance), soft-pop-rockers (title track, fast tempo and tough attitude attached), odd Dylanesque blues-rock tell-tales (ʽFriday's Tie-Dye Night­mareʼ), and then there's even a couple of nostalgic pushbacks with ex-husband Goffin, re­sulting in ʽStanding In The Rainʼ (supposedly a follow-up to ʽCrying In The Rainʼ?) and ʽIt's Never Too Lateʼ, whose title clearly echoes ʽIt's Too Lateʼ, yet the song itself is like a carbon copy, mood-wise and style-wise, of ʽNatural Womanʼ, what with the tempo, the broken piano patterns, the musical ascension, the gospel harmonies — everything.
But I don't feel as if any of that stuff really works. The Goffin/King numbers are precisely what they are — faint, unconvincing echoes of former glories, way too self-conscious and too bent on looking into the past for inspiration. The pseudo-Dylan song is an embarassment — she is trying to throw up a heap of nonsensical lyrics as if she were Bob circa '65, and she might just as well be trying her hand at a Handel-style oratorio. The title track is bland and inoffensive at best. And the most recognizable tune of 'em all, ʽNow And Foreverʼ, may only be so because it was used in A League Of Their Own, a corny baseball melodrama with Tom Hanks and Geena Davis with Billy Joel and James Taylor on the soundtrack to complete the curdled milk effect.
The only good thing I can say is that the voice is still intact, along with the overall radiance, idealism, and charisma: spiritually, Carole King never grows old, and that's adorable — and on a personal basis, probably more important than still being able to come up with unforgettable melo­dies. However, this does not save the album from a thumbs down assessment. The least she could have done in this situation was to make all the record sound like ʽIt's Never Too Lateʼ — even if the genius has departed, this might have been a tasteful, if still forgettable, trip down nos­talgia lane. As it is, it's a rather glum mix of nostalgia with banality and corniness, hardly for­givable for a songwriter of Carole's stature even in her later years.
IN CONCERT (1994)
1) Hard Rock Cafe; 2) Up On The Roof; 3) Smackwater Jack; 4) So Far Away; 5) Beautiful; 6) Natural Woman; 7) Hold Out For Love; 8) Will You Love Me Tomorrow; 9) Jazzman; 10) It's Too Late; 11) Chains; 12) I Feel The Earth Move; 13) You've Got A Friend; 14) Locomotion; 15) You've Got A Friend.
I like how this was officially called The Colour Of Your Dreams Tour, yet a grand total of one song from that album actually made it onto the accompanying live album — perhaps she did perform a bit more on stage, but I doubt it, because, well, it's Carole King, and if Carole King goes on stage, she has to do Tapestry in its entirety (8 out of 12 songs, to be accurate — the other four they don't play on the radio that often), plus a few of the lively golden oldies like ʽChainsʼ and ʽLocomotionʼ, and before you know it, you're running out of time and nobody wants to hear the crap you've been writing of late anyway. Who we're kidding?
Time has pretty much rendered this record useless, particularly now that the vaults have been opened and you can listen to a young and fresh Carole singing the same songs at Carnegie Hall in 1971 — but she does have the advantage of preserving her voice and charisma in an immaculate state, so as long as she and her band do not tamper too seriously with the songs, it doesn't make that much difference whether you're listening to a 1971 or a 1993 performance: the lady carries that classic vibe with her in her pocket wherever she goes, and she'll be sticking to her guns even if we all turn into a bunch of grinning post-modern nihilists overnight.
Unfortunately, from time to time they do tamper with the songs, and as hard it is to spoil a great Carole King tune when Carole King herself is performing it, they almost succeed with ʽBeautifulʼ, which is given a smooth and soulless adult contemporary sheen — apparently, as a «pleasant surprise» for the audience, which sits in befuddled silence as it is treated with several bars of a milk-curdling «atmospheric» intro, then feebly cheers at the sounds of "you gotta wake up every morning...", with most of the people probably feeling duped rather than pleasantly surprised. A less serious misfire is the new glam-rock setting for ʽChainsʼ, with distorted guitars and fiery solos — the song does not exactly lose its fun quotient, but the fun does seem cheapened.
If it's any consolation, lead guitar duties are consistently handled by none other than Slash, who now takes it to the stage after collaborating with Carole on ʽHold Out For Loveʼ — yes, that is the one and only song from Colour Of Your Dreams that made it onto here, with a dutifully ex­tended lead guitar break from the man, and Carole also encourages him to let his hair down (as if it already weren't) every time she does a «rocker», which leads to odd results. Then again, you just might be interested in Slash's take on ʽLocomotionʼ or ʽJazzmanʼ (ʽJazzmanʼ actually works very well, with inspired solos from all of the band members, including short, energetic breaks from the bassist and drummer), because, after all, we're not talking about some completely gene­ric hair metal guitar player here... aren't we?
I could certainly do without Carole choosing one of her worst songs ever to open the concert (ʽHard Rock Cafeʼ — no, Ms. King, not even the presence of Slash legitimizes any part of this as a «hard rock» show, even if it does kick ass from time to time), and while I have nothing against backing choirs or Crosby and Nash, it was hardly necessary to include two versions of ʽYou've Got A Friendʼ, one of them with a young choir and the other one with two aging hippies. Why not do ʽRaspberry Jamʼ as an encore instead? Surely her band is capable of building up a beauti­ful not-altogether-pop vibe — they do it well enough on ʽJazzmanʼ.
But in the overall context of these 73 minutes of live performance, that is nitpicking; and as much as these echoes of Carole's insipid early 1990s style jab and sting the senses from time to time, I cannot agree with the oc­casional assessment that on this album, Carole redoes her classics «in Nineties' fashion». Most of the arrangement details and accompanying vibes really stay the same, so, if anything, this album works as proof that if you wanted to go to a Carole King show in 1993, you needn't be afraid that she'd fuck it up too much. Does it prove anything else? Well, it does offer hope that any Carole King show, as long as she's alive, will always be enjoyable to a large degree — actually, I have the Living Room Tour DVD from 2005, and it's even better than this one (no bad songs whatsoever), though probably not worth a separate review. The only important thing is never to let her remember that it's not 1971 anymore. — you do that, and you're in for a huge embarassment, almost inevitably.
LOVE MAKES THE WORLD (2001)
1) Love Makes The World; 2) You Can Do Anything; 3) The Reason; 4) I Wasn't Gonna Fall In Love; 5) I Don't Know; 6) Oh No Not My Baby; 7) It Could Have Been Anyone; 8) Monday Without You; 9) An Uncommon Love; 10) You Will Find Me There; 11) Safe Again; 12) This Time.
Every once in a while you might come across a warmly positive mention of this record as a «return to form» for Carole King in the new millennium — so let this review serve as a warning, because while we all have the right to love and cherish Ms. King as a 21-st century relic of a great age in popular songwriting, and her radiance and optimism (and voice, for that matter) show no sign of decay even as she is pushing 60, this should not be an excuse to give a truly insipid, by-the-book collection of poorly written and generically arranged adult pop tunes anything more than a passing glance. In fact, there's so much commonplace saccharine here that it almost makes City Streets seem like tough punk-rock in retrospect.
Not a lot of people (at least, not a lot of people whose musical opinions I'd be interested in) would regard it as a good sign that the «biggest» song here is ʽThe Reasonʼ, originally written by Carole for Aerosmith and having since then become a big hit for Celine Dion — with Celine herself reprising her part and singing a duet with the songwriter. Not a lot of people would find comfort, either, in hearing K. D. Lang support Carole on the even more insipid Disney-style ballad ʽAn Uncommon Loveʼ — and these are some of the biggest guest stars on the album, whose rather predictable cast also includes Steven Tyler on the upbeat pop rocker ʽMonday Without Youʼ (one of the few enjoyable numbers here), Wynton Marsalis on ʽI Wasn't Gonna Fall In Loveʼ (he may be a talented musician for all I know, but boy does he like to lend a hand to all sorts of schlock by other people), and Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds as producer on most of the tracks, which might just be the root of all the other problems, but I don't feel much like investigating.
In short, when your first song sounds like Mariah Carey (without the smallest sign of redemption in the form of a powerhouse vocal) and your second song sounds like The Backstreet Boys (with­out the smallest sign of redemption in principle), the only remaining question is: «Is there any­thing worth pulling out of the wreckage?» Well, other than ʽMonday Without Youʼ, which at least gets a good physical groove going on... no, not really. The saddest thing of all is that within such a bland context, even a remake of an old classic like ʽOh No Not My Babyʼ sounds toothless and just as unexciting as everything else.
And here, I think, lies the answer to the question about why Carole did not put out even one LP of completely new material since 2001 — not to mention performing only one song from this one (the title track) on her ensuing Living Room tour; she may not confess it in public, but I'm pretty sure that deep down inside herself she knows very well that she has had nothing whatsoever left to say since at least the early Eighties, and all she can do in terms of creativity is depend on the kindness of babyfaced strangers. Which is actually worse than it could have been — at the very least, she could have chosen «retro» arrangement and production values for her new stuff, making it sound at least superficially like Tapestry. Instead, she is now trying to emulate the corny «Divas» who owe her much of their own existence in the first place — and ends up in the same ditch as Aretha Franklin, with their late-era careers having quite a bit in common. Anyway, in case you were wondering, no, this is not a comeback. Her live shows at the time were still won­derful, but this new studio material — terrible, just terrible. Thumbs down, definitely.