RAMBLE ON: "I Feel the Earth Move" by Carole King

One of the major changes in music writing that fascinates me is how, as rock music plummeted in relevance in the 2010s, people stopped using “rock” as a catch-all term for popular music; we call that “pop” now. It isn’t just a name change. Yes, both terms are very broad; “rock history” and “pop history” both happily claimed, say, Otis Redding, even though he was arguably neither. But “rock” and “pop” have different values, and the shift has emphasized different things. Artists who were undervalued before – like ABBA – have seen their stocks rise, while others – like Led Zeppelin – have trended downward.

But it hasn’t affected everybody. Some acts – The Beatles, the Beach Boys, Queen, Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, every classic r&b artist of the ‘60s and ‘70s – have seen their glowing reputations undimmed. Carole King is one of those lucky acts. In the pop era, her bonafides as a songwriter extraordinaire has given her the kind of credibility that Sia or Bruno Mars enjoy now – a deep respect not necessarily from having a cult of personality, more for just having a vast catalog packed with enduring, wildly successful classic songs.

But what of Carole King the rock star? She makes an unlikely candidate as a rock-and-roller, a motherly-looking woman in homey sweaters who made unchallenging, easily-listenable songs for easy listening stations. The critics of course loved the ‘70s singer-songwriter movement, but King didn’t have a background in folk music like Dylan or Joni or even James Taylor. She began as a Brill Building pop songwriter, and though she would never resemble a pop diva, her background in pop always set her apart from her earnest ‘70s peers; she wrote love songs with catchy lyrics and melodies without necessarily aspiring to self-conscious poetry or social commentary. She was always the woman who wrote “I’m Into Something Good” and “The Loco-Motion” and made no apologies for it.

And yet Carole King was always beloved by the same rock critics who disdained pop, and Tapestry has always been rightly acclaimed as one of rock and roll’s greatest albums. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone pinpoint why, so I’d like to make the case for Carole King the rocker – a legend not just for her ability to craft hooks and melodies but also as a performer, a singer, a musician. The fact that the album begins with a genuine ass-kicker makes this job easier.

The grand piano is not a rocker’s instrument. Anyone who’s able to really bang on that unwieldy contraption has double the respect, as they have a giant handicap; it exists either for ballads or to add texture to the base instrument, the guitar. Carole King – gentle, frizzy-haired Carole King with her goddamn cat on the cover of the album – begins the record by banging on that piano with a purpose. It’s a piano riff that seems like it should be a guitar riff (for fun times, check out this video with Carole King performing with Slash; even with a virtuoso shredder behind her, the piano kicks off this song). I love trying to translate heavy guitar riffs like “Smoke on the Water” and “School’s Out” on my piano, and the riff to “I Feel the Earth Move” is constructed exactly the same way, a full-on power chord on keys.

The song is such a headbanger that I don’t think I’ve ever thought about what the song is actually about. Allmusic describes it as “the ultimate in hippie-chick eroticism” and “sounds like the unleashing of an entire generation of soft-spoken college girls' collective libidos.” To me, “Hippie-chick eroticism” sounds way off – Carole King wasn’t a hippie and didn’t make hippie music, “soft-spoken college girl” was definitely more accurate. But also, eroticism doesn’t sound the right descriptor to me either. I’ve never seen it as a particularly horny song – not any more than any good rock song is about sex, at least. I know that, lyrically, it is obviously about sexual attraction, but to me this song is not necessarily about what it’s “about.” For me, “I Feel the Earth Move” is music for music’s sake, it’s about Carole King wanting to rock out and doing it. There are performance clips where she performs it like her other songs, on solo piano, but it doesn’t truly come alive until she has the full band behind it. When she does have a full backing group, she lets someone else handle the keyboard work and she comes out and dances and she looks like she’s having a blast. My favorite is the one linked above, which has not just the guitar solo but a kickass sax solo too. But give her solo versions this – when she’s on her own, she shows you that she can jam just as well on her own on the keys like Jerry Lee Lewis. The glory of rock and roll is that it allows even the stiffest, quietest girl in the neighborhood to throw down.

I really think Tapestry doesn’t get enough credit for just the excellent musicianship on it. Those arrangements are spare but they’re not simple; fittingly for someone who wrote for Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, King and her band give some of the tightest playing you will hear on an album. I don’t think the production gets enough credit either. I called it “immaculate” once, and someone on Twitter objected, saying that it hardly sounded lush or effortful enough to earn that description. But that’s the point, isn’t it?  Carole King is no one’s idea of a powerhouse singer and she’d sound completely wrong with a more polished production. What she lacks in vocal prowess she makes up for emotion, and the production is raw on purpose to highlight it. It gave Carole King the cred the folkie cred that she wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise. All Carole King really did when she became a performer is bring her plain-spoken earthiness to the same kind of hit songs she had already written, and yet it seemed like she dictated the path of every songwriter to follow. What an earth-shaking song.