Once more with healing

James Taylor and Carole King have been close friends for more than 40 years.

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EMOTIONAL HONESTY. That's the thing all great songs have in common, or at least, so I'm told by two of the most successful songwriters ever to marry golden melody to tear-stained lyric.

"Today, it's all about marketing" croaks Carole King, who is recovering from laryngitis and sounds precisely like Grover from The Muppets. "But back in our time, a song had to have integrity. It had to speak directly and honestly to the heart and capture people's emotions with a good melody and a good lyric."

After a polite pause, the soft voice of James Taylor joins her. "Really, you just have to write something that's meaningful and true to you and hope that it might also resonate for other people. It's not an easy process, believe me."

Taylor and King have been close friends for more than 40 years, and it shows. They praise each other constantly, finish each other's sentences, and laugh at each other's jokes, even the bad ones. Today, King's in Idaho, and Taylor's in Massachusetts. They're sharing a phone line, but in April next year they'll be sharing a stage in New Zealand.

"This new tour is a celebration of all our years of friendship and common musical sensibilities," squeaks King, who last played here in 2006. "It's an acknowledgement of mutual respect of each other's work, and we're really excited to be kicking off these shows down in the southern hemisphere with you. As a friend, James has always been there for me, and I love his songs. My Tapestry album was written under the heavy influence of James, and I'll always be grateful for his generosity in sharing the spotlight."

"We love working together," adds Taylor, who says he hasn't played here in 17 years. "To me, Carole embodies a rare kind of musical integrity. Her voice has a purity to it, and I love the elegant architecture of her songs. Her songs are rare gems." The Auckland show is part of the duo's Troubadour Reunion tour, a reference to a short residency they shared at LA's famous Troubadour club in 1970. A turning point in their respective careers, the Troubadour shows marked King's debut as a solo artist and found Taylor on the cusp of stardom, still months away from the release of his breakthrough album, Sweet Baby James.

Now 61, Taylor has since sold more than 40 million records, won a host of Grammys and been inducted into the Rock`n'roll Hall of Fame, but he was only 21 when he played at the Troubadour, emerging into the light after an extremely rough few years, raw and blinking and grateful to still be alive. When this man sings that he's seen fire and he's seen rain, he means it.

The son of a doctor and an aspiring opera singer, Taylor was a frail, troubled child who dropped out of school aged 16 because he found the pressure too much to bear. A bout of severe depression led to a nine-month stay in a psychiatric hospital, followed by a move to New York's Greenwich Village, where he became a heroin addict, playing guitar in his local park each day to ward off his demons before passing out on a bench. His nearby apartment became a crash pad for runaways, drunks and fellow junkies. Eventually, his father rescued him and drove him to a rehab facility in North Carolina. After checking out, Taylor moved to London and released his debut album on The Beatles' Apple label, but soon fell back into his old drug habit and returned to hospital in America. When he got out, he moved to California for a fresh start, and hired little-known New York songwriter Carole King to join his band on piano for the Troubadour gigs.

"I was perfectly happy with that background role, too" recalls King. "But James nudged me up front to sing. He said – why don't you sing `Up On The Roof' tonight? I did, and it changed my life." Taylor: "I was actually suggesting she should go outside and get up on the roof and sing. But seriously, as soon as she started singing her own songs, she really knocked it out of the park. Carole had spent years writing songs to help other people's careers, and when she finally stepped into the light herself, there was a real blossoming there that was overdue. People felt it. Her music had passion and momentum and when Tapestry finally came out, nobody could resist it."

Indeed. Though King's debut solo album tanked in 1970, her 1971 follow-up Tapestry was a juggernaut. Driven by peerless singles such as "So Far Away" and "It's Too Late", it stayed in the US charts for six years and sold more than 10 million copies, becoming the top-selling solo album of the 70s. But King was no overnight success.

Before friends like James Taylor encouraged her to go solo, King had already spent a decade writing a string of huge hits with former husband Gerry Goffin, including such rippers as The Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", The Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday", The Chiffons' "One Fine Day", and Aretha Franklin's "Natural Woman". Her songs have been covered by The Beatles, The Byrds, Dusty Springfield, The Carpenters, and of course, James Taylor, who quite possibly bought his first mansion on the proceeds of "You've Got A Friend". King even wrote a painfully chirpy hit for her babysitter, "Little" Eva Boyd: "The Loco-Motion", which returned to annoy us a second time in 1987 when it was taken for another run up the charts by Kylie Minogue.

KING IS now 67 and, like Taylor, still releasing albums that are well-regarded by fans while being dismissed with a shrug by most critics who believe both artists did their best work nearly four decades ago.

Back then, Taylor's Sweet Baby James and King's Tapestry pioneered a more introspective songwriting style that has been much emulated ever since. Both albums were intensely personal – "Fire And Rain" from Sweet Baby James reflected on the suicide of a friend Taylor met in a mental institution – but the voices were warm and soothing and the songs offered a measure of solace among all the soul searching. Perhaps this is why these records were so successful; they provided what was needed at a very difficult time.

After all the cultural upheavals and political activism of the 60s, people were emotionally exhausted. They wanted to calm down for a while and do some healing. The music of King and Taylor helped create a peaceful little oasis of calm between the angry 60s and the aspirational 80s.

"Absolutely," says King. "Our songs sometimes had wider political implications, but we were mostly concerned with personal expression, and people really welcomed that at that time. Tapestry connected so strongly because it was a case of right place, right time. It was an album that brought things down from all the turmoil of the 60s to something that was heartfelt, simple, honest and personal."

Taylor agrees. "I believe we assemble our own personal stories from songs and art and theatre; these artforms give us strength and support as we become ourselves, and they feed back to us that other people are feeling the same things we are. That's what our music did back then, and I hope that's what it's still doing now, 40 years later."

King tries to add something, but after talking for half an hour, her voice has all but disappeared. She clears her ravaged throat, and delivers one parting thought. "Songs also have the simple purpose of just making people feel good. They help connect people together, and I love that idea. That's partly why I do what I do. In our country, there's constant fighting between Republicans and Democrats, and I like to think that our music can draw these people together in the same room for two or three hours so they forget about that. Songs have the power to stop people fighting, if only for a few hours, you know? But unfortunately, once the music's over, they go out and fight again."

James Taylor and Carole King's "Troubadour Reunion" tour plays Auckland's Vector Arena on Saturday, April 10, 2010. Tickets on sale from Monday, November 23, from Ticketmaster.

- © Fairfax NZ News