Carole King

Carole King - Colour of Your Dreams - 1993 - Kings X Records

In the 1970's, Carole King, the great singer/songwriter released some brilliant, critically-acclaimed albums, like "Writer", "Music", "Rhymes & Reasons", "Wrap Around Joy", and of course the all time classic "Tapestry". "Tapestry" was praised by critics and fans alike, went to number one and included the hit singles “It’s Too Late” and “So Far Away.” In 1972, Carole won four Grammy Awards: Record of the Year for “It’s Too Late,” Album of the Year for Tapestry, Song of the Year for “You’ve Got a Friend,” and Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Female for Tapestry. Over the next few years, Carole released a number of albums, for a total of eight Gold, five Platinum and one Diamond certification to date. However, most of Carole King's later releases are forever being compared to albums like "Writer" and especially "Tapestry". Many of her albums have been discounted by music critics for not living up to the very high standards of those two albums. In the music business, it's hard to win. You are only as good as your last release, and after a string of hugely successful seventies' albums, Carole found it hard to receive much recognition for albums as good as "Colour of Your Dreams". The album has received some mixed reviews, more bad than good, and for the most part, not very constructive. Ironically, many music lovers regard this album as her best work after "Tapestry"! Carole's albums will always be compared to her classic "Tapestry", but most of the songs on "Colour of Your Dreams" have beautiful melodies. "Wishful Thinking" and "Now and Forever" are only two of the many songs on this album which equal anything Carole ever wrote. Two of the tracks were written with Gerry Goffin. "Colour of Your Dreams" is a much maligned and very underrated album, and is HR by A.O.O.F.C. There is more to Carole King than "You've Got A Friend", or "It's Too Late". Carole King from Brooklyn, NYC remains one of the greatest living singer/songwriters. Listen to Carole's "Carnegie Hall Concert: June 18, 1971" album. You can find Carole's "Fit for a King" album @ CAROLK/FFAK The City (Feat. Carole King) "Now That Everything's Been Said" album is @ CITY/CAROLK/NTEBS Her "Pearls Songs Of Goffin And King" album is @ CAROLK/PRLS/SOG&K Her "City Streets" recording is located @ CAROLK/CSTS and her "Hardrock Cafe" is @ CAROLK/HRC N.B: COYD has been released on CD with two bonus tracks, "Te Daria La Vida (Amor)", and "Lay Down My Life (Edited for radio)"

TRACKS

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 *
All tracks composed by Carole King, except * by Carole King, & Gerry Goffin

MUSICIANS

Carole King - Guitar (Acoustic), Piano, Keyboards, Vocals, Vocals (bckgr)
Rudy Guess - Guitar (Acoustic), Guitar
J.J. Holiday - Slide Guitar
Saul Hudson ("Slash") - Guitar on "Hold Out For Love"
John Humphrey - Bass
Ted Andreadis - Organ, Keyboards
Robbie Kondor - Synthesizer
Chris Frazier, Danny Carey, Jerry Angel - Drums
Lynn Coulter - Drums, Percussion
Danny Pelfrey - Saxophone, Vocals, Vocals (bckgr)
Jim Avery - French Horn
Leata Galloway - Vocals, Vocals (bckgr)
Linda Lawley - Vocals (bckgr)

REVIEWS

In the sterling years of FM radio, when it was no crime to sandwich King Crimson, Stevie Wonder, the Velvet Underground and Bessie Smith in the same set, songwriter Carole King shattered sales records with her transcendent second solo album, Tapestry. Back then, the limits of contemporary rock were defined by factors other than decibels and uptight radio consultants. The giddy success of King's refined collection of smoky love songs promised to pave an open road of possibilities for her and her contemporaries Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and Carly Simon. Now, twenty-two years down the road, radio is a very different animal. Whereas the testosterone-driven ballads of Ugly Kid Joe and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are accepted on the dreaded AOR format, a woman's place seems confined to adult-contemporary hell. King's eighteenth album, Colour of Your Dreams, clings to the hope that the tender touch of songs that prod romantic faith needn't be anathema – especially for a woman. Especially for a woman over forty-five. It would be funny if King's sly inclusion of guitar god Slash on Colour's "Hold Out for Love" was partly a slap at the barriers facing her generation of female musicians. Otherwise, Colour of Your Dreams shifts and murmurs with King's resonant themes of shadowy regret, whispered apologies and pulses of the heart. "Wishful Thinking." "Now and Forever" and the eternally hopeful "It's Never Too Late" (for love, of course) are vintage King tunes, replete with wistful vocals encircling deceptively simple melodies. As always, she is economical with her words, preferring hints rather than handouts. Storytelling was never King's forte, but even weaker narratives like the social critique "Tears Falling Down on Me" – alluding to both rape and the beating of Rodney King – succeed because she wisely skirts the soapbox, making her points with watery emotional brush strokes rather than bold splashes of complaint. With the exception of an errant drum machine here and there, Colour of Your Dreams remains admirably dry of flashy attempts to recast King's acoustic-based compositions. Not that King should have to compromise herself at all. In fact, she could be considered one of the spiritual forebears of the softly subversive underground of young female songwriters trying to break into the boys' club of the FM band. Ironically, King's battle for renewed recognition is frustrating testament to the bullheadedness of today's radio programmers – who no doubt grew up owning a well-worn copy of Tapestry. **** © KARA MANNING (Posted: Jun 24, 1993) © 2010 Rolling Stone http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/176174/review/5946653/colourofyourdreams

The success of "Now And Forever," which was used as the opening credits music for the summer 1992 film hit A League Of Their Own, seems to have earned Carole King another shot at record-making, albeit with an indie label. That song turns out to be one of the few highlights of a varied collection in which King sings some love songs and then turns to more serious fare, with dubious results. In "Tears Falling Down On Me," she flails helplessly against generalized injustice. "If I could," she notes, "I'd change the course of history." Wouldn't we all? "Friday's Tie-Dye Nightmare," meanwhile, is an attempt at the kind of funny, frightening song Bob Dylan made a specialty of in the mid-1960s, but it only succeeds in proving that Carole King is no Bob Dylan. The best new songs here are two that reunite King with old partner Gerry Goffin, who still has a way with a romantic lyric. Which leaves us with only one question: Why does a girl from Brooklyn use the British spelling of "colour"? © William Ruhlmann © 1996 - 2010 CD Universe
http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/1206993/a/Colour+Of+Your+Dreams.htm

The success of "Now and Forever," which was used as the opening credits music for the summer 1992 film A League of Their Own, seems to have earned Carole King another shot at record-making, albeit with an indie label. That song turns out to be one of the few highlights of a varied collection in which King sings some love songs and then turns to more serious fare, with dubious results. The best new songs here are two that reunite King with old partner Gerry Goffin, who still has a way with a romantic lyric. © William Ruhlmann © 2010 Rovi Corporation. All Rights Reserved http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:kbfqxqqgldje

BIO [ © David Collins [ from Contemporary Musicians, December 1991 , Volume: 6, by David Collins , www.concentric.net/~Jjones24/carole.html]

An introspective, stage-frightened woman with a wispy though resonant voice, Carole King seemed an unlikely bet in the early 1970s to become one of the top-selling recording artists of all time. But she moved quickly into that elite class with just one album, 1971's Tapestry, which by itself has sold more than 14 million copies worldwide and was the best-selling LP of all time until the Bee Gees surpassed it at the height of the disco craze with their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. While Tapestry made King a household name as a singer, her previous career as a songwriter had already firmly established her reputation in recording industry circles. As Jon Pareles and Patricia Romanowski reported in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock, "King has had two outstanding careers. Throughout the Sixties, she was one of pop's most prolific songwriters, writing the music to songs like 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow' and 'Up on the Roof,' with most lyrics by her first husband, Gerry Goffin. Then in 1971, with her multimillion-selling Tapestry, she helped inaugurate the Seventies' singer/songwriter style." King seemed to arrive at the peak of her talents just in time to take advantage of a post-psychedelic generation that yearned for songs with a more personal, acoustic sound and lyrics that reflected simpler values. Actually, King's arrival at the superstar level was due more to a long fermentation in the shadows of the music industry. Born Carole Klein on February 9, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, King took an early interest in music and had formed her first band, the Co-sines, while still in high school. While attending Queens College, King met Goffin; the two began what would become a long personal and professional relationship. Along with notable songwriters Neil Sedaka--a childhood friend of King's--Cynthia Weil, and Barry Mann, King and Goffin joined Al Nevins and Don Kirshner's Aldon Music company and composed hundreds of songs in the Brill Building's cubicles, famous for incubating hit songs for decades. In 1961, King--who was not yet 20--and Goffin had their first hit when "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" became a Number One single for the Shirelles. In the early 1960s there was a strong push among music publishers for songs written exclusively for black artists; King's longtime interest in rhythm and blues stylings gave her a head start on the competition, as evidenced by the Drifters's Top Ten hit with the King-Goffin composition "Up on the Roof." Soon, Goffin and King were the hottest songwriters in the business. They followed their chart-topping success with the hits "Hi-De-Ho" for Blood, Sweat, and Tears, "One Fine Day" for the Chiffons, "Natural Woman" for Aretha Franklin, "Oh, No, Not My Baby" for Maxine Brown, and "Locomotion," the Number One hit the Goffins wrote for their seventeen-year-old baby-sitter, Little Eva. As Jon Landau wrote in Rolling Stone: "The songs of Goffin and King are superb examples of the songwriting craft of the Sixties. Finely honed to meet the demands of the clients who commissioned them, and written with the requirements of AM radio always firmly in mind, they still managed to express themselves in a rich and personal way. Like Hollywood directors who learned how to make the limitations of the system work for them and in the process created something of their own pop vision." A mid-1960s attempt by Goffin, King, and Al Aronowitz to launch their own Tomorrow label failed, as did the Goffin marriage, which ended in divorce and King's move to Los Angeles with their two daughters. King was relatively inactive during this period, although she did continue to write both music and lyrics. In 1968 she formed a group called The City with bassist Charles Larkey--who would become her second husband--and Danny Kortchmar, a former member of the New York City club band Flying Machine, who introduced King to that group's vocalist, James Taylor. Because of King's stage fright, The City never toured; their only LP was an unsuccessful effort for Lou Adler's Ode label called Now That Everything's Been Said . At this point it was Taylor who provided the encouragement King needed to take the next logical step in her career. Taylor had been much impressed by many of King's compositions for The City, particularly "You've Got a Friend," which he later turned into a hit himself. Taylor urged King to continue to write and record her own songs; the result was the 1970 album Writer, which displayed flashes of a new maturity in King's writing along with her richly textured piano chords. Writer enjoyed just enough success to merit another solo effort, Tapestry, which featured the hits "I Feel the Earth Move," "So Far Away," "It's Too Late," and King's own version of "You've Got a Friend," which Taylor had already taken to Number One on U.S. charts. Tapestry made it to Number One on the album charts, scored four Top Ten hit singles, and remained on the charts for 302 straight weeks--until 1977. Understandably, King could never quite duplicate the incredible success of Tapestry, but for a period of years after its release she continued to produce quality work on LPs like Music, Rhymes and Reason, Fantasy, and Wrap Around Joy. King switched to Capitol Records in 1975 and immediately produced the gold record Simple Things, but it seemed clear by this time that her most productive period had passed. She continued recording into the 1980s, but sporadically and never with as much success as in earlier years. By that time she had become something of a recluse, preferring to live quietly in her Idaho home and make only a few concert appearances. King did, however, break new ground in her career in 1988 by appearing in an off-Broadway play called A Minor Incident