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.imagenetz.de/mqUyv

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.