A goodbye spoken in an even voice
The electric piano sets a calm pulse, almost cheerful, and Carole King’s voice comes in from bed, staying in all morning just to pass the time, already past the argument.
The words are Toni Stern’s. She wrote them quickly, she later said, in about twenty minutes, on a day when she was blue and looking for a love she could not find, and she brought the page to King, who put it on the piano and found the music inside an hour or so. That was their method in Laurel Canyon. It’s Too Late was recorded for Tapestry at A&M Studios in Hollywood, Lou Adler producing, and released as a single in the spring of 1971. Danny Kortchmar’s guitar stays dry. Curtis Amy’s tenor saxophone takes the instrumental chorus and makes it sound like a city evening, not a weep. Charles Larkey plays bass. The album, out in February 1971, turned King from a Brill Building writer into the person in the room, and this song was the one radio could not stop playing.
It sat at No. 1 in America for five weeks, then gave up the spot to James Taylor’s version of her own You’ve Got a Friend. In 1972 it won the Grammy for record of the year. King has said, without claiming the sentences as hers, that Stern’s lyric speaks for people going through divorces. Stern has declined to name the man. The rumour pointed at Taylor, with whom she had been involved. The song does not need the name to work. Something inside has died, and she will not fake it. The calm of the vocal is the point. Panic would have been easier, and less true.
I was feeling rather blue, looking for love, not being able to find it. And the first line came to me and the rest of the song just flowed. There was hardly a rewrite in it that I can recall.
(Toni Stern, NPR)
Live, King plays it without theatre. The left hand keeps the figure, the voice stays level, and the room understands that the decision has already been made. That is why the record still sits inside other people’s breakups, long after 1971. It does not accuse. It notices. The saxophone, when it returns, is almost kind, which is crueler than a shout. Adler kept the sessions close and quick, a small band, a songwriter at her own piano, no attempt to inflate a private ending into a spectacle.
What remains is the adult tempo. Pop goodbyes usually slam a door. This one folds a shirt. Stern’s first line, the morning in bed, is ordinary enough to be anyone’s, and King’s melody lifts it just enough to be remembered without turning it into opera. Between them they wrote the sound of a relationship that really did try, and then stopped. The chorus does not beg. It states the time, and the time is past.
