Skip to main content

Carole King on songwriting in the age of Trump: 'I am the honest opposition'

The songwriter has been drawn out of semi-retirement, rewriting her song One to try to persuade voters to ‘take us away from the terrible direction America is going in’

At her home in rural Idaho, Carole King is having some difficulty saying the president’s name. “Trump,” she manages eventually, her accent still pure Brooklyn half a century after she left New York and became the biggest-selling female solo artist of the early 70s. “I don’t even like using his name,” she says. “Let’s not use his name. Let’s just say ‘the leader of my country’ instead.”

King keeps a low media profile that speaks more of a self-effacing personality than suspicion or reclusiveness. As reviews of her 2012 autobiography, A Natural Woman, pointed out, she has a tendency to play down her vast success, barely mentioning in the book that her 1971 album Tapestry sold 25m copies, and summarising the astonishing run of 1960s hits she wrote with her then-husband, the late Gerry Goffin – The Loco-Motion, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, Up on the Roof, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman – with the line: “We continued to write enough songs to pay our mortgage.”

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2EQqrpE
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more