Carole King - It Might as Well Rain until September - More Legendary Demos, Volume 1 (1959-1965)

Carole King is one of the best and most successful songwriters of all time. Incredibly enough, she wrote or co-wrote 118 top 100 hits in the U.S.!

Her musical career is really split into two. From the late 1950s until about 1970, she was pretty much a pure songwriter, rarely releasing music under her own name and never playing in concert. Then, in 1971, she had a huge hit with the "Tapestry" album, which was one of the most successful albums of all time, and was the start of a long and successful career for her as a performer.

In the first phase of King's career, although she rarely publicly released singles, she usually made private demos of her songs for other artists to work from. She had a good voice (as her success with "Tapestry" and after showed), and good musical and production instincts, and easily could have had a lot of hits on her own if she wanted to. This is shown by the fact that one of her few early singles in her own name, "It Might as Well Rain until September," was a hit in 1962, even reaching number three in Britain.

An album's worth of her demos were officially released in 2012 as "The Legendary Demos." But this album just scratched the surface of all the demos she did. I've collected many more, most of which are still officially unreleased, though available on some bootlegs pretending to be legitimate and sometimes sold in stores. I've made three such albums, which I call "More Legendary Demos." This is the first one.

Only five of the songs here have been officially released. Two were singles at the time, and three more came out on "The Legendary Demos" album. But the sound quality of the others are just about as good as the officially released ones.

I could have included many more songs. But I only selected the ones I liked. Frankly, in King's early years, she wrote (and demoed) a lot of formulaic songs that haven't stood the test of time. But sometimes, magic would strike, and she would come up with some all time classics. Not all such classics are represented here, because she either didn't make demos of them or the demos haven't become publicly available. For instance, here are just a few of the songs from the early 196s0 I wish I had demos of, but don't: "Chains," "The Locomotion," "I'm into Something Good," "One Fine Day," and "Halfway to Paradise." She really was a hit-making machine!

By the way, note the song "Bad Boy" on this album. Does the melody ring a bell? In my opinion, it's extremely similar to "Pocahontas" by Neil Young, which of course was written many years after this one. I wonder if Young was aware of "Bad Boy", which was officially released in 1962 but obscure, or if the similarity is just a coincidence.

This album is 40 minutes long.

UPDATE: On May 17, 2022, I updated the mp3 download file. I discovered one song I'd previously missed: "Don't Let Me Stand in Your Way." It's unreleased, and seems to have emerged the year before on YouTube.

01 Samson and Delilah (Carole King & Gerry Goffin)
02 Every Breath I Take (Carole King)
03 Take Good Care of My Baby (Carole King)
04 Disappointed (Carole King)
05 He's a Bad Boy (Carole King)
06 It Might as Well Rain until September (Carole King)
07 Crying in the Rain (Carole King)
08 Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (Carole King)
09 Go Away Little Girl (Carole King)
10 Up on the Roof (Carole King)
11 Oh Oh, It Started Over Again (Carole King)
12 Hey Girl (Carole King)
13 Oh No, Not My Baby (Carole King)
14 Don't Let Me Stand in Your Way (Carole King)
15 Just Once in My Life (Carole King)
16 Stage Door (Carole King)

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There are very few early photos of Carole King. For the album cover, I used a popular publicity photo. For the rest of the cover art, I used much of the artwork from the "It Might as Well Rain until September" single. The photo originally was in black and white, but over a year after originally posting this, I colorized it.