Sunday March 6, 2022 “So Far Away” Carole King
Along with twenty five million other record buyers, I have Carole King’s Tapestry album in one of my several boxes of vinyl. Hands up who also owns that album? OK all of us with our hands up, we’re old, Tapestry was released in 1971…and would stay on the charts for nearly six years.
Tapestry was produced by legendary producer Lou Adler (Mamas & Papas, Grassroots, Barry McGuire) and “So Far Away'' included on this album has guitar provided by James Taylor accompanying singer/songwriter Carole King’s piano work.
Carole King is one of the most prolific and successful songwriters in the modern age. In the 60s she started writing music in the Brill Building with her then husband Gerry Goffin. As an aside, it has always intrigued me that Goffin wrote the lyrics for such female oriented songs as “Natural Woman” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”.
King is a two time member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame once as a songwriter and once as an artist, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and is the first woman to win the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song awarded by the Library of Congress. As a solo artist she has sold more than seventy five million records and literally countless millions more for songs that she wrote for other artists.
She has 118 top forty hits that she has written or co-written, and those of us who own the Tapestry album will probably know the words to every one of those songs.
Stay safe and well…and “So Far Away” was a favorite of Amy Winehouse and she often sang it with her father, Mitch. Her funeral service on July 26, 2011 ended with a rendition of the song.