Carole King - I Wrote It, So I'm Singing It (1968)

Carol Joan Klein in was born in February 1942 in Manhattan to a Jewish family. From an early age she had an insatiable curiosity about music, and so her mother began teaching her some very basic piano skills, but did not give Carol actual lessons. When Carol was four years old, her parents discovered she had absolute pitch, which enabled her to name a note correctly by just hearing it, and real music lessons started shortly after this discovery In the 1950's she went to James Madison High School, where she formed a band called the Co-Sines, and changed her name to Carole King (many Jews did during this period to avoid an omnipresent anti-semitism). The band made demo records with her friend Paul Simon for $25 a session, and in 1958 she made her first official recording with the promotional single 'The Right Girl', released by ABC-Paramount. She attended Queens College, where she met Gerry Goffin, and they married when she was 17 after King had become pregnant with her first daughter, Louise. They quit college and took daytime jobs, Goffin working as an assistant chemist and King as a secretary, but wrote songs together in the evening. 
In 1959 Neil Sedaka, who had dated King when he was still in high school, had a hit with 'Oh! Carol', and Goffin took the tune and wrote the playful response 'Oh! Neil', which King recorded and released as a single the same year. Among their other compositions was 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow', which was a hit for the Shirelles, and following that success Goffin and King gave up their day jobs to become full-time songwriters. During the sixties the two wrote a string of classic songs for a variety of artists, including 'Chains', which was recorded by the Beatles, 'The Loco-Motion' for their babysitter Little Eva, and 'It Might as Well Rain Until September', which King recorded herself in 1962 and which was her first hit single. Other songs included 'Half Way To Paradise',  'Take Good Care of My Baby', 'Up on the Roof', 'I'm into Something Good', 'One Fine Day', 'Pleasant Valley Sunday', '(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman', 'Some Of Your Lovin'', and 'Goin' Back'. In order to try and sell these songs the duo would often record demo versions of the songs, and some of these have surfaced over the years, although not 'I'm Into Something Good' or 'Halfway To Paradise', which I'd love to hear. 
For this album I've gathered together 15 of these demos that have turned up over the years, which are mostly King with piano or guitar accompaniment, although on 'Up On The Roof' she plays piano while Goffin takes the vocal. You might not know that she wrote 'The Porpoise Song' for The Monkees' film 'Head', with that song since going on to become a psychedelic classic, and she tried it again with 'Dear Marm', although that one wasn't picked up by the band. When you see a list of the songs that Goffin & King wrote it's almost unbelievable that they came from the pens of just two people, as there are so many classic songs in their repertoire, and we can now hear them as the band or artist who were interested in them would have first heard these songs.   

Track listing

01 Crying In The Rain
02 Oh No, Not My Baby
03 Up On The Roof (Carole King piano, Gerry Goffin vocal)
04 Go Away Little Girl
05 Stage Door
06 Hey Girl
07 Take A Giant Step
08 Just Once In My Life
09 If I'm Late
10 Pleasant Valley Sunday
11 Take Good Care Of My Baby
12 Porpoise Song
13 Dear Marm
14 Yours Until Tomorrow
15 Image Collector