Anyone who failed to follow up an album that had sold four million copies with a very similar album would have to be either a fool or Bob Dylan. Carole King is neither, and her new album Carole King Music, follows with gingerly tread in the footsteps of Tapestry. The spirit of her music remains warm and strong, her lyrics still carry personal messages of friendship and loyalty, and the same musicians are playing in back of her. Despite the similarity between the two albums, the songs on Carole King Music are not as immediately likable and the new album doesn't have its predecessor's sure, unified sense of style.
of our white pop stars–black in her phrasing, in the feeling of the songs she composes, and in her deep love of rhythm and blues. So it is fitting that she launches the album with "Brother, Brother," a song that appears to be a response to Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On." Carole evokes the musical feeling of Marvin's song with bongos and a beseeching vocal. Marvin had sung "Brother, brother, there's too many of you dying." Now a white sister takes up the same "Brother, brother" refrain and adds her heartfelt assent: "You have always been so good to me/And though you didn't always talk to me/There wasn't much my lovin' eyes could not see/And I don't believe you need all your misery." Whether Carole is speaking to some generalized conception of blacks in America or to one raceless individual, her lyric stands as beautiful.
"Brother, Brother," the best song on the new album, is a perfect example of vintage King. The chord progression–characteristically neat, logical, compelling and unforgettable–marks it as a pop hit. The lyric, as usual, contains an urgent and complex message–a hint of frustration, some warm words of encouragement and a passionate avowal that "you know I love you like no other." In her own songs (as opposed to those with lyrics by Gerry Goffin or Toni Stern), Carole invariably addresses a "you." She is incapable of writing a song that is not to someone; it is because she writes from this personal impulse, not from a pop impulse, that her songs are so moving. This same urgency to reach out and reassure gives her voice its haunting, inimitable tug.
Beyond all this, "Brother, Brother" is unmistakably cast in the black idiom. Three other songs on the album could serve as deadly accurate Motown followups. One has no trouble hearing Smokey Robinson wrapping the raw silk of his voice around the exquisite first two bars of "Surely"–one of the most subtle, serpentine melodic lines Carole has ever written. The wonderful rhetoric of the lyric, inflated with dignity borrowed from Roberts' Rules of Order ("Surely you know how I sta-hand on the issue of my loving you") is worthy of Smokey's "I Second the Emotion." "Brighter" and "Growing Away from Me" could both have come from the Motown songwriting
