Song of the Day 12/12: Carole King, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”

WXPN’s contest countdown is nearly through (as I post this there are fewer than 60 songs to go) and most of the entries I put on my ballot because I thought they’d be underrepresented have been played. So have most of my late rejects. This song has been played, too, but not by this artist. The original recording, a No. 1 hit for the Shirelles in 1960, appeared at No. 469, but I wanted the version Carole King released on 1971’s “Tapestry.”

King, of course, wrote the music for the tune – it was titled simply “Tomorrow” on its original pressing – but she was singing lyrics written by her then-husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin. They divorced in 1969, in the wake of Goffin’s bad experience with hallucinogenics, but trouble started much earlier, when Goffin fathered a child with young singer Earl-Jean Reavis in 1964, and he was displeased when King scored a No. 22 hit in 1962 with a song the duo wrote for Bobby Vee, “It Might as Well Rain Until September.”

Goffin blamed the breakup of their songwriting partnership on her desire to write her own lyrics, which she did with a vengeance on “Tapestry,” one of the best-selling LPs of all time. But she also included a slowed-down reading of their first No. 1 hit, made especially poignant not just by her delivery but the history behind it.