Various Artists - Covered: Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Volume 6: 1974-2019

This is the sixth and final album in my Covered series that celebrates the songwriting of Gerry Goffin and Carole King. And this is the album where things get a bit weird.

What I mean by that is that, for this volume, the performances I'm including are probably wildly different from the ones most other people would include. Goffin and King stopped writing songs together at the end of the 1960s, but both of them continued to have success on their own, sometimes collaborating with others. But I'm not including a lot of the hits they had in the late 1970s and after. Both of them did a lot of poppy mainstream stuff that was commercially successful, but in my opinion is bland, overproduced, and forgettable. In their defense, it's not just them; it happened to popular music in general. They simply followed trends to stay successful.

So, far instance, Goffin had big hits with "Tonight I Celebrate My Love" by Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson in 1983, "Nothing's Going to Change My Love for You," a number one hit in Britain for Glenn Medeiros in 1988, "A Long and Lasting Love" by Crystal Gayle in 1985, and "Miss You like Crazy" by Natalie Cole in 1989, among others. King had some more hits as well, though they weren't as big. She did a lot better with remakes of her earlier hits. For instance, Kylie Minogue had a huge hit with a remake of "The Locomotion" in 1988. But I'm not including any of those for the reasons mentioned above.

Instead, I've included a bunch of songs that were hits in this time period, but I've also included many songs that were done by totally obscure artists of good Goffin and/or King songs that weren't covered by anyone else in earlier years. For certain songs I definitely wanted to include, I had to resort to finding versions on YouTube by people who apparently don't even have any officially released music. But I doubt you'll notice because those versions are just as good as the others.

By the way, Goffin's solo songwriting efforts were nearly shut out in the last two volumes in this series. But he made a comeback for this album. He had some massive hits, for instance "Theme from 'Mahogany' (Do You Know Where You're Going To)" which he co-wrote, and which was a number one hit in 1975. Similarly, "Saving All My Love for You" was a number one hit for Whitney Houston in 1985. But I've selected the original non-hit version by Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. (both of them formerly of the 5th Dimension) in 1978. It isn't as infected with the cheesy overproduction problems of the 1980s.

Goffin died in 2014 at the age of 75. As I write this, King is 78 years old and is still going strong with her music career as well as lots of charity projects. Long may she run.

One final note. John Lennon of the Beatles once said that he wanted his Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership to be the "Goffin and King of Britain." In my opinion, that's the ultimate compliment he could have made.

By the way, if anyone knows of good covers of Goffin and/or King songs that I've missed, please let me know. They wrote so many good songs that I'm sure I've missed some.

01 Jazzman (Counts)
02 Theme from 'Mahogany' [Do You Know Where You're Going To] (Diana Ross)
03 Saving All My Love for You (Marilyn McCoo & Billy Davis, Jr.)
04 I Can't Make It Alone (Maria McKee)
05 It's Not the Spotlight (Beth Orton)
06 Monday without You (Wilsons)
07 An Uncommon Love (Joan Osborne with the Chieftans)
08 Bitter with the Sweet (Samuel Purdey)
09 Wrap Around Joy (Candye Kane)
10 When My Little Girl Is Smiling (Paul Carrack)
11 Hard Rock Cafe (Anne Fox)
12 Being at War with Each Other (Rumer)
13 Sweet Young Thing (Carrington MacDuffie)
14 Nightingale (Justin Ploof & the Throwbacks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17180185/COVRDGoffnKng1974-2019Volum6_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Jn32X4rK

The cover art photo comes from an awards show in 2012. For I think the only time in this entire series, I didn't have to do any Photoshop work to get their heads close together or the like.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Various Artists - Covered: Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Volume 5: 1971-1973

This is the fifth out of six volumes in the Covered series, celebrating the songwriting of Gerry Goffin and Carole King.

Things definitely have changed since the first three albums, which were mostly hits co-written by Goffin and King. After their divorce at the end of the 1960s, King went on to releasing one of the most popular albums of all time, with 1971's "Tapestry," while Goffin didn't have nearly the same songwriting success.

Like the last volume, this volume is still heavily dominated by King's songs, with a good number of songs from "Tapestry." Only the first one, "Smackwater Jack," is from 1971, but four others are later "Tapestry" covers ("It's Too Late," "So Far Away," "Tapestry," and Way Over Yonder"). Pretty much all the rest of the songs are covers of King's songs from her other solo albums, without any songwriting involvement from Goffin. However, "Smackwater Jack" was cowritten by him. Perhaps it was from a couple of years earlier when they were still married, though I don't know for sure.

That said, Goffin wasn't done yet. It's just that the early 1970s wasn't a particularly good time for him. He would bounce back and have a good number of hits without King's involvement. The first such big hit is here at the end, "I've Got to Use My Imagination," which was a Top Five hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1973.

By the way, "Dixie Highway" is another rare case of a Carole King song from this era that apparently was never recorded and released by King.

01 Smackwater Jack (Quincy Jones)
02 It's Too Late (Isley Brothers)
03 So Far Away (Marlena Shaw)
04 It's Going to Take Some Time (Carpenters)
05 Ferguson Road (Bobby Vee)
06 Walk On In (Lou Rawls)
07 Sweet Seasons (Isley Brothers)
08 Tapestry (Alice Babs)
09 Way Over Yonder (Judy Mowatt)
10 Corazon (Creative Source)
11 Eventually (Buffy Sainte-Marie)
12 Been to Canaan (Alice Babs)
13 Dixie Highway (Martha Reeves)
14 I've Got to Use My Imagination (Gladys Knight & the Pips)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17180179/COVRDGoffnKng1971-1973Volum5_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/KhinsP6i

There's good news and bad news with the cover art photo here. The good news I've used a color photo of Goffin and King together. The bad news is it's not from the time period in question, or even close. I'm not sure, but I think it's from the 1990s. I wish I had something more fitting, but this was all I could come up with. There pretty much are no photos of Goffin and King together from the end of the 1960s until decades later, when they started appearing together at tributes and award shows and the like.

I also must admit that I edited the photo significantly. Goffin was significantly taller than King, so I raised King's head up relative to everything else so I could have both heads larger in the frame. And I moved their bodies so there wasn't a big gap between them, again allowing me to have their heads larger in the frame.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Various Artists - Covered: Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Volume 4: 1969-1971

This is the fourth of out six volumes in the Covered series for songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King.

This is a particularly important one, because it marks when Goffin and King stopped working together, yet continued to write hit songs separately. But, for a time, King was much more successful than Goffin. She put out solo albums in 1968 and 1970 that sold very little. Then, in 1971, she released her album "Tapestry." It sold 25 million copies, becoming one of the most successful album of all time! This album contains covers of a bunch of songs from "Tapestry." Most of the rest from that album will appear on the next album in this series.

Goffin, meanwhile, kept a low profile. He didn't release any of his own music at the time, and I don't think he had any hits as a songwriter either. He would, later. He's only a co-writer on a few songs here, which are remnants of the Goffin and King songwriting partnership, like "Take a Giant Step" and "Hi-De-Ho (That Old Sweet Roll)."

By the way, from this point on, pretty much all the King songs would first appear on King's own albums. But there are a few songs in the 1970s that she never released herself. "No Sad Song" and "A Fine Way to Go" are examples. Plus, "After All This Time" was only done in concert by her at the time, then was released on an archival live album decades later.

01 Take a Giant Step (Taj Mahal)
02 What Am I Gonna Do (Smith)
03 So Much Love (Dusty Springfield)
04 Sweet Sweetheart (Carla Thomas)
05 To Love (Matthews Southern Comfort)
06 Hi-De-Ho [That Old Sweet Roll] (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
07 I Feel the Earth Move (Vivian Reed)
08 Beautiful (Petula Clark)
09 Where You Lead (Barbra Streisand)
10 After All This Time (Merry Clayton)
11 No Sad Song (Helen Reddy)
12 Child of Mine (Anne Murray)
13 A Fine Way to Go (Lonnie Mack)
14 Home Again (Kate Taylor)
15 You've Got a Friend (James Taylor)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/BAZKnT6Z

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/0UMIPt3vEk96i5A/file

I'm not happy with the cover I made for this album. I found some black and white photos of Goffin and King to use for the 1960s albums in this series. I also found some much later color photos of Goffin and King to use in albums after this one. But at the start of the 1970s, neither Goffin nor King looked like how they did in the 1960s, nor did they look like how they did later. So I found separate photos of each of them from the era and Photoshopped them in together. The problem is, the lighting, coloring, texture, etc, doesn't really match. So I'm unhappy.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program. I'm happy now. :)

Various Artists - Covered: Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Volume 3: 1966-1969

I'm trying to post these once a day until I'm done. So here's the third of out six albums in the Covered series celebrating the songwriting of Gerry Goffin and Carole King.

As I mentioned in the last volume, Goffin and King were married (since 1959) but their marriage started to fall apart in the mid-1960s due to Goffin's adultery. Adding to that, when LSD got trendy around 1967, Goffin began using LSD, and other drugs. That led to mental problems, including getting diagnosed with manic depression and being hospitalized. Their marriage staggered on for a little longer, but they finally divorced in 1969.

That also meant the end of their songwriting partnership. The vast majority of the songs on this volume are still credited to Goffin and King, but I'm not sure if that's true. Consider John Lennon and Paul McCartney, where they continued to put both their names of songs near the end of the Beatles even when just one of them had anything to do with the song. (For instance, Lennon's solo hit "Cold Turkey" was credited to Lennon and McCartney even though McCartney not only didn't have any role in it, he downright disliked it.)

In addition to Goffin's issues, one reason their songwriting partnership broke up was that King had generally written the melodies while Goffin wrote the words, but King increasingly wanted to express her own feelings by writing her own words, so she didn't need Goffin's help anymore. So the songs on this volume increasingly reflect King's point of view, even when they were written by both of them. A good example is the all-time classic "(You Make Me Feel LIke) A Natural Woman," which was definitely written by both of them, but clearly reflects a woman's personal feelings.

Despite the occasional huge hit like "A Natural Woman," the commercial success of Goffin and King was going down during the late 1960s, as musical trends changed and their poppy style partially went out of fashion. So an increasing number of songs here are non-hits, and sometimes fairly obscure. But I think they are all solid, and most of them probably would have been hits if they'd been released in a different era.

01 Goin' Back (Dusty Springfield)
02 Stage Door (Tony Jackson)
03 No Easy Way Down (Germz)
04 Pleasant Valley Sunday (Monkees)
05 [You Make Me Feel Like] A Natural Woman (Aretha Franklin)
06 Snow Queen (Roger Nichols & the Small Circle of Friends)
07 So Goes Love (Shirley Abicair)
08 I Don't Think You Know Me (American Breed)
09 Sometime in the Morning (Monkees)
10 A Man without a Dream (Ben E. King)
11 Road to Nowhere (Hearts & Flowers)
12 Wasn't Born to Follow (Byrds)
13 Now That Everything's Been Said (Peggy Lipton)
14 Porpoise Song ['Theme From Head'] (Monkees)
15 You're Just What I Was Looking for Today (Status Quo)
16 Something Better (Marianne Faithfull)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17180159/COVRDGoffnKng1966-1969Volum3_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/SA3Ygoui

Once again, I struck out trying to find any color photos of Goffin and King together in the 1960s. For the one I've included here, I don't know what year it's from, but I'm guessing it's from the mid-1960s based on the general look. I edited the photo slightly to move Goffin and King closer together, allowing me to make their heads larger in the picture frame.

Months later, I figured out how to colorize the photo, so I did. 

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Various Artists - Covered: Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Volume 2: 1964-1966

This is the second of six albums of my Covered series, highlighting the songwriting of Gerry Goffin and Carole King. If you want to know more in general, I recommend you read my comments from the first album in the series.

For this album, the Goffin and King songwriting partnership was still going strong, but there were big problems brewing. Although they were married, Goffin cheated on King. He fathered a child with Earl-Jean in 1964, the singer of the first song on this album. But the marriage, and songwriting partnership, kept on until the late 1960s.

In terms of success, after the Beatles hit it big in 1964, bands increasingly wrote their own songs. But there still was enough demand for professional songwriters for Goffin and King to have plenty of hit songs during this time period. However, a few of the songs here weren't hit songs at all, but just songs I think are as good.

01 I'm into Something Good (Earl-Jean)
02 One Wonderful Night (Honey Bees [Cookies])
03 It Might as Well Rain until September (Helen Shapiro)
04 Oh No Not My Baby (Maxine Brown)
05 He's in Town (Tokens)
06 I Can't Hear You [No More] (Betty Everett)
07 Let Me Get Close to You (Skeeter Davis)
08 She Don't Deserve You (Honey Bees [Cookies])
09 Yes I Will (Hollies)
10 I'll Love You for a While (Dusty Springfield)
11 Just Once in My Life (Righteous Brothers)
12 At the Club (Drifters)
13 Is This What I Get for Loving You (Marianne Faithfull)
14 Honey and Wine (Hollies)
15 Some of Your Lovin' (Dusty Springfield)
16 Don't Bring Me Down (Animals)
17 Wasn't It You (Petula Clark)
18 I Won't Be the Same Without Her (Twilights)
19 Don't Forget about Me (Barbara Lewis)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17180155/COVRDGoffnKng1964-1966Volum2_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/rLcmrAnC

For the cover art, I again found it impossible to find any color photos of Goffin and King together at the right time period. But I did find this nice black and white one. However, it was tilted at an odd angle. I straightened it out. A chuck of Goffin's body in the lower right corner of the photo was missing after the adjustment, but I filled it in using Photoshop. I also raised King's head relative to Goffin's, since she was significantly shorter than him, and that helped me maximize their head sizes within the frame.

Months later, I figured out a way to colorize the image, so I did so. 

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Various Artists - Covered: Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Volume 1: 1960-1963

It's time for more of the Covered series, looking at the best songs from the greatest songwriters of all time. Here, I'm starting to post my albums on Gerry Goffin and Carole King, one of the greatest songwriting teams ever, if not the best and most commercially successful.

This should probably be called "Carole King and Gerry Goffin," because King was especially successful, having a big career as a songwriter with Goffin and then having a huge solo career of her own. But I'm going with "Goffin and King" because that's how they're commonly referred to, just as it's always the "Lennon and McCartney" songwriting team in the Beatles, never "McCartney and Lennon." Anyway, King has had 116 Top 100 hits in the US, making her the most successful female songwriter of the 20th century. Goffin though was very successful after the songwriting partnership with King ended, and has has 114 Top 100 hits in the US.

Goffin and King met in college in the late 1950s and immediately began writing songs together. They married in 1959. In 1960, they wrote "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," one of the biggest and most covered songs of all time, and went from success to success after that. Every now and then, they would have hits writing songs without the other one, but in the 1960s the last majority of their songs were written together.

Because these two songwriters have been so exceptional, I've dug especially deep. Sure, I've included virtually all of their hit songs, but I've also included songs that weren't hits at all but I think are very good. I found so many songs that I like that this series on them totals six albums, with each album being about 45 to 55 minutes long.

One important caveat. As I mentioned above, King has been hugely successful on her own, especially with her 1971 album "Tapestry," which sold 25 million copies worldwide. I've deliberately avoided including any performances by King. I have three albums I've posted her of her demos, so there's no need to repeat that. And I figure any fan of this would have "Tapestry" and her big solo hits. So, for instance, she had a rare early solo hit in 1963 with "It Might as Well Rain until September." But I didn't include that here. Instead, I'll include a cover of it from 1964 in the next album in this series.

By the way, here are Wikipedia links if you want to know more about them

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Goffin

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_King

01 Will You Love Me Tomorrow (Shirelles)
02 Some Kind of Wonderful (Drifters)
03 Don't Ever Change (Crickets)
04 Take Good Care of My Baby (Bobby Vee)
05 Every Breath I Take (Gene Pitney)
06 Halfway to Paradise (Billy Fury)
07 Crying in the Rain (Everly Brothers)
08 The Locomotion (Little Eva)
09 Go Away Little Girl (Steve Lawrence)
10 Chains (Cookies)
11 Up on the Roof (Drifters)
12 Make the Night a Little Longer (Shirelles)
13 How Can I Meet Her (Everly Brothers)
14 Keep Your Hands Off My Baby (Little Eva)
15 Point of No Return (Louis Jordan)
16 Hey Girl (Freddie Scott)
17 I Can't Stay Mad at You (Skeeter Davis)
18 One Fine Day (Chiffons)
19 Don't Say Nothin' Bad [About My Baby] (Cookies)
20 Poor Little Rich Girl (Steve Lawrence)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ewa37qCw

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/CsadqP2DyswCECm/file

I'm not sure what year the photo for the cover art was taken. But both Goffin and King look very young, so I'm using it first. Unfortunately, there seem to be virtually no color photos of them from the 1960s. So I've had to use a black and white one, but I colorized it to make it more interesting.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Various Artists - Grace of My Heart - Extended Edition (1996)

Here's something different than the stray tracks collections or concerts I usually post here. This is the soundtrack to the 1996 movie "Grace of My Heart." Normally, I wouldn't post something like this, because I assume the soundtrack is still in print. But, for various reasons, some really good performances were left off the official album. I've found about 20 more minutes of music not on the soundtrack that should have been, which I think is enough to justify posting this here.

"Grace of My Heart" is a very good movie, in my opinion. It currently gets 75 percent at Rotten Tomatoes. But I think that number would be higher for you if you're a big music fan. The story is closely based on the life of singer-songwriter Carole King, though there's a section where she gets involved with a Brian Wilson figure that never happened in reality.

None of the songs were actually written by King, but a bunch of very talented songwriters wrote songs in her style for the movie, including Burt Bacharach, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, Jill Sobule, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and Gerry Goffin (who was King's main songwriting partner for most of her 1960s hits). Normally, I'm not big on movie soundtracks, which are usually instrumental mood music or a random collection of  hit songs, but I make an exception for this one. The songs do a great job of recreating the sounds of the 1960s and 1970s, and they stand as good songs of their own.

Unfortunately, there were a bunch of songs that were featured in the movie that didn't make it onto the soundtrack. Most of these have never been made public in full, so the only way to listen to them is by getting the audio from the movie. I did exactly that for five of them. One more, "How Can I Get through to You," appeared in full as a bonus feature on the movie DVD. For the five I took from the audio, there was nothing I could do to fix things if there was movie dialogue over the songs. Luckily, there was very little of that for those. But the downside is that each of those songs are relatively short, sometimes just a minute or so, because things have to move quickly in a movie. In the case of "Heartbreak Kid," I had to piece together a song out of two separate snippets. I then repeated the chorus, to make a song that's still only a minute long.

On top of that, there's a couple of other extra songs from other sources. One weird thing is that Joni Mitchell wrote the song "Man from Mars" for the soundtrack, and her version of it appeared on it for the first week the album was on sale. But the soundtrack was produced by Larry Klein, Mitchell's husband, and they were going through a divorce right when the soundtrack came out. I guess some dispute between them led to her version being yanked and replaced by a version sung by Kristen Vigard, an actress who also is a really good singer, and who did the vocals for all the parts sung by the Carole King-esque main actress. Mitchell put "Man from Mars" on her next album, but that was a totally different version. I've included her original version here, as well as the Vigard version.

I also have two versions of "God Give Me Strength." This song was co-written by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, and led to the two of them making an entire album together two years later. The soundtrack featured the version performed by Bacharach and Costello, but in the actual move it was sung by Vigard, who did a great version of this excellent song. So I've included both versions of that as well.

Costello also wrote the song "Unwanted Number," but a version by the retro soul group "For Real" was used on the soundtrack instead. Costello didn't put his own version on a studio album until 2018. He did play the song in concert in 1996, in a solo acoustic format, the same year the movie came out However, the sound quality isn't great on that one. So I've included the 2018 version as part of the album, and the 1996 version as a bonus track.

Thus there are three songs with two versions (including three versions of "Unwanted Number," if you could the bonus track). But those are all especially good songs, and the different versions are done by different performers, and they're all worth hearing.

Hopefully, a deluxe version of this soundtrack will be released someday, with complete versions of all the songs. Most of the songs I grabbed from the movie audio should have more complete versions without any talking over them. But also, there are another four or five songs that I couldn't include because there was so much talking and other noise over them. In particular, there were three more songs by "For Real" that I couldn't salvage. So an official version of everything would have a lot more to offer than what I'm presenting here.

Oh, one other thing I did that seems like a no-brainer to me is that I ordered all the songs, released and unreleased, in the order that they appeared in the movie. The official soundtrack had them in no logical order that I could see. The only exceptions to this ordering are the songs with two versions. I put the versions that didn't appear in the film at the end.

01 Hey There (Kristen Vigard)
02 In Another World (Kristen Vigard)
03 Blues Ain't Nothin' but a Woman Crying for Her Man (For Real)
04 In Another World (Portrait)
05 Born to Love that Boy (For Real)
06 Unwanted Number (For Real)
07 I Do (For Real)
08 Heartbreak Kid (Williams Brothers)
09 My Secret Love (Miss Lily Banquette)
10 Love Doesn't Ever Fail Us (Williams Brothers)
11 Truth Is You Lied (Jill Sobule)
12 God Give Me Strength (Kristen Vigard)
13 Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (Boyd Rice & Tiffany Anders)
14 Groovin' on You (Juned)
15 Take a Run at the Sun (J Mascis)
16 Don't You Think It's Time (J Mascis)
17 How Can I Get Through to You (Juned)
18 Man from Mars (Kristen Vigard)
19 Between Two Worlds (Shawn Colvin)
20 A Boat on the Sea (Kristen Vigard)
21 God Give Me Strength (Burt Bacharach & Elvis Costello)
22 Unwanted Number (Elvis Costello)
23 Man from Mars [Piano Version] (Joni Mitchell)

Unwanted Number (Elvis Costello)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701197/VA-GrceofMyHertSundtrck_1996_atse.zip.html

Since I changed this album so significantly, I decided it needed a different album cover. I used the cover of the DVD as the basis. But that was rectangular, so I made some changes to get it to fit into a square space. Also, I removed a list of the actors in the film. That left a big black space. I filled that by adding in a photo of Kristen Vigard, since she had such a prominent role as vocalist.