Carole King

Carole King needs no introduction when the piano of Tapestry begins to play. That album is not just a record: it is the sound of someone who learned to listen to music before playing it. At just four years old, her mother discovered she could name notes by ear, and from then on, the keyboard became her language. There were no forced lessons, just a curiosity that led her to decipher melodies from the radio before she could read sheet music. By age nine, she was already composing her first songs, and at sixteen, she was recording demos with Paul Simon for twenty-five dollars a session. The leap from Carol Klein to Carole King wasn’t a name change—it was the first step toward making music her home.

What many don’t know is that her career as a songwriter took off long before the public knew her name. In the 1960s, alongside Gerry Goffin, she wrote more than two dozen hits for other artists, from "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" by The Shirelles to standards that are still covered today. These weren’t songs meant to last forever; they were meant to play on the radio the next day. But when Writer arrived in 1970, the world realized that her voice—her own, not someone else’s—deserved to be heard. The album went unnoticed, but Tapestry, a year later, stayed at the top for sixteen weeks. It wasn’t luck: it was the moment when someone who had always written for others decided to sing for herself.