Carole King: She Made the Earth Move by Jane Eisner; © 2025; Yale University Press; ISBN 9780300-258469; 238 pages plus appendices; $28
This book is an outsider’s assessment of songwriter and vocalist Carole King’s life and contributions to popular music. Author Jane Eisner wasn’t able to secure an interview with the reclusive King, nor with members of her family, so she had to rely on what was already published by other writers or said by King, herself, in her memoir and in preserved broadcast interviews.
Eisner did marvelous work despite these limitations. She stitched together numerous other sources—a rabbi who officiated at King’s life cycle events; other singers like James Taylor who had commented publicly on her works; music critics assessing her output; and musicians who helped identify what made King’s compositions structurally different from those of most other songwriters.
To the extent that she was able, Eisner followed in King’s physical journey: Her girlhood home in Brooklyn; a music studio in Manhattan; a move to the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles; a retreat to rural Idaho where she practiced a back-to-the-earth lifestyle for a time.
Eisner also took note of King’s four marriages and divorces, providing some analysis about why they didn’t work.
Tapestry, King’s breakthrough album issued in 1971, took up 25 pages of the biography, with Eisner igniting readers’ nostalgia with mini-essays on such King compositions as “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”; “I Feel the Earth Move;” “So Far Away;” “It’s Too Late”; “Beautiful” (which later became the theme of a Broadway musical about King); “You’ve Got a Friend;” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”
In short, Eisner took all the steps that a well-versed biographer of a dead person might take, hoping to combine little threads of information into an authoritative yarn. The trouble is, King is very much alive and by that fact alone, this biography seems incomplete. So much more insight could have been provided had King opened up to her, or had Eisner been able to conduct in-depth interviews with King’s children, her divorced husbands, or a substantial number of her collaborators.
Nevertheless, if you are a fan of popular music – especially of its icons – this book belongs in your library.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.