You’ve Got A Friend

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You’ve Got a Friend

Written by Carole King, 1971

By the start of 1971, Carole King had already spent more than a decade writing hits for other singers, but she was only just stepping forward as a performer in her own right. That January she was in the studio recording her second solo album, Tapestry, while her good friend James Taylor was recording his own album, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, at the same time. The two sessions overlapped so closely that they shared some of the same musicians, and it was in the middle of all this that King wrote “You’ve Got a Friend.”

She always spoke of it as a song that seemed to arrive on its own. “The song was as close to pure inspiration as I’ve ever experienced,” she said. “The song wrote itself.” The story of what stirred it came out only many years later. King told Taylor that she had written it in response to a line in his earlier song “Fire and Rain,” a song he wrote after a very dark stretch of his young life. In that line he sang about lonely times with no friend to turn to, and King’s answer was, in effect, a gentle promise that he did have one. Taylor said he hadn’t known this until the two of them were preparing for a reunion concert decades later. “That came as a real revelation to me,” he said.

When Taylor first heard King play the new song, he loved it and wanted to record it himself, even though she planned to include it on Tapestry. She gave him her blessing. Both recorded it, Taylor’s version with Joni Mitchell singing harmony in the background. King’s version appeared on Tapestry, which became one of the best-loved albums of its era, but it was Taylor’s recording that was released as a single. It rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1971, the only time Taylor ever reached the top of that chart.

There’s a curious footnote, too. Dusty Springfield recorded the song in early 1971, before Taylor’s version came out, but her recording sat on the shelf for nearly thirty years before anyone heard it. Meanwhile, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway released their own duet version as a single on the very same day as Taylor’s, and it reached the Top 10 on the R&B chart.

At the Grammy Awards in 1972, the song earned honors for both old friends: Song of the Year for King as the songwriter, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for Taylor. Over the years it has been recorded by dozens of artists, from Aretha Franklin to Michael Jackson, but at heart it remains what it was the day King wrote it, a simple, steady reassurance from one friend to another.