James Taylor and Carole King have been friends and collaborators for more than half a century, but they could easily have got off on the wrong foot when, right at the start of their relationship, they ended up recording one of King’s most famous songs almost at the same time.
We’re talking about You’ve Got A Friend - not only one of the standout songs on King’s classic 1971 album, Tapestry (a record that’s full of standout songs, to be fair), but also a number one hit for Taylor in the same year.
Speaking to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Taylor has been describing how this confluence of events occurred. He says that, when King was a songwriter for hire, penning hits with her then husband, lyricist Gerry Goffin, he “channeled a lot of Carol without knowing it.”
As both artists became fixtures on the Laurel Canyon music scene in the late ‘60s, they became friends, and ended up working together. King played piano and sang backing vocals on Taylor’s 1979 album, Sweet Baby James, and they ended up touring together.
“We were playing a job together at The Troubadou - a dive, really - in Los Angeles, but an important gig to play,” says Taylor. “And she and I were going back for the second or third engagement at The Troubadour and she broke the seal on this brand-new tune.”
The song, which would turn out to be You’ve Got a Friend, struck an immediate chord with Taylor. In fact, he thought it was so good that he must have heard it before.
“I was sure I knew the song already because it was such a classic immediately,” he says. “I literally ran to find my guitar so I could play it.”
Fast-forward a couple of weeks and Taylor was in the studio working on his new album, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon. “We had a couple of hours left,” he remembers. “That’s typically when someone will think of a cover - that’s how we waited up doing How Sweet It Is, Handy Man, Up On The Roof [an earlier King/Goffin composition]. It’s just a spur of the moment drop of the hat; we would do a quick arrangement and ‘boom.’”
In this instance, Taylor’s thoughts turned to that King song that he’d heard her play but, at this point, she hadn’t even recorded herself. “I said, ‘Let’s play that song of Carole’s,” he recalls.
Taylor was pleased with his interpretation, but that presented him with a potential problem: King was already working on Tapestry and planning to include You’ve Got A Friend on there.
“Of course she wants to record that song - it’s the best song written by a human being,” Taylor says. “So I blithely go and record the song and then we really liked the way it sounded. So I had to go to Carole and say ‘I sort of… cut your hit.”
Taylor suggests that he felt a bit sheepish, but that King was remarkably supportive. “She said, ‘that’s great.’ It was typically generous.”
There could have been a reason for this kind-heartedness: King would go on to tell Taylor that You’ve Got A Friend was written as a response to his own Fire and Rain, in which he sang ‘I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend’.
“She said, ‘I heard those lines and I was thinking to myself, I’m going to tell him he does have a friend.’”
How’s that for wholesomeness?
It’s also worth pointing out that, in the end, everyone benefitted from being nice to each other: Taylor got his number one single, and his album was only kept off the top of the charts by, yep, you guessed it, Carole King’s Tapestry, a record that has now sold more than 15 million copies. And who played guitar on King’s own version of You’ve Got A Friend? That would be James Taylor.
The song would end up being covered by countless other artists - Donny Hathaway's live version is definitely worth seeking out - and Taylor and King have performed it together on several occasions.
In fact, in 2010, they came full circle, singing it together back at The Troubadour, almost 40 years after that very first airing.
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