Carole King - So Goes Love - More Legendary Demos, Volume 2 (1966-1969)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the first of three albums containing Carole King's demos of songs that she wrote that were usually performed by others. This is the second album in that series. In my opinion, it's even better than the first one, as she moved away from her early 1960s Brill Building style to her more sophisticated "Tapestry" style.

King wrote some big hits in the late 1960s - the time period covered here - such as "Pleasant Valley Sunday" by the Monkees and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" by Aretha Franklin. (A couple more hits are not on this album because the demos haven't been made public, such as "Don't Bring Me Down" by the Animals and "Goin' Back" done by both Dusty Springfield and the Byrds.) But she had less success than before, because the trend was for music acts to write their own songs.

Yet, as I mentioned above, her songwriting was getting better and better. Most of the songs here at least got covered by some artists at some point, though some were obscure acts. And I think a couple of the songs near the end of the album never got covered at the time at all. King was more than capable of performing her own songs, as her massive 1971 album "Tapestry" would prove. She was all but forced to start her own musical career in the late 1960s, with her first album coming in 1968 (called "Now That Everything's Been Said").

I haven't included anything from that album, or her other studio albums, since this is a collection of demos. But I did include the songs from an obscure single she put out in 1966 ("A Road to Nowhere" backed by "Some of Your Lovin'") since the songs never made it on any album. Plus, those two songs essentially sound the same as her demos, which are much more produced than typical demos.

In addition to those two songs from the single, five more songs have been officially released. All of those were included on the archival album "The Legendary Demos." The remaining nine songs are still officially unreleased. But the sound of those are pretty good, since they're all well-produced demos that were done in the studio.

I think this is a fantastic album, because King is an ace songwriter who performs and produces well. But also, many of the songs are good but obscure, because King never put them on any of her albums and other artists were shying away from recording her songs towards the end of the 1960s. 

This album is 48 minutes long.

01 A Road to Nowhere (Carole King)
02 Some of Your Lovin' (Carole King)
03 Like Little Children (Carole King)
04 So Goes Love (Carole King)
05 Pleasant Valley Sunday (Carole King)
06 I Won't Be the Same Without Her (Carole King)
07 Sometime in the Morning (Carole King)
08 Take a Giant Step (Carole King)
09 Yours until Tomorrow (Carole King)
10 A Man without a Dream (Carole King)
11 [You Make Me Feel Like] A Natural Woman (Carole King)
12 Dear Marm (Carole King)
13 Lady Pleasure [with the Sunshine Eyes] (Carole King)
14 Image Collector (Carole King)
15 Porpoise Song [Theme from 'Head'] (Carole King)
16 If I'm Late (Carole King & Gerry Goffin)

https://www.imagenetz.de/cVkrF

For the album cover, I used the same template as the cover for the first album in this series, but I changed the basic color to yellow. The photo of King in the middle is from 1970. I would have preferred to use a photo of her from the late 1960s, but I couldn't find any good color ones.