Did Carole King write ‘It’s Too Late’ about James Taylor?
No emotion has been kinder to the pop song format than love. Even though there have been many great songs meant as odes to that special someone, there are just as many that are written after being played for a fool and left with your heart in a million pieces. Carole King may have known how to write those kinds of songs better than most, but ‘It’s Too Late’ may have had something to do with her longtime collaborator, James Taylor.
For the first few years of her career, it looked like King was going to be one of those lifetime artists who lived in the background. Considering how many songs that she wrote specifically to give to other artists, it’s not like she was hyping herself up as one of the greatest performers in the world.
After she began breaking free from her ties to Gerry Goffin, Tapestry was the moment where she finally started to take control of her own songs. Throwing in her own renditions of songs like ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’, her debut is the ultimate example of the old phrase that no one sings a song quite like its composer, making tracks that are a lot more poignant knowing that she wrote the melody.
Not everything was written strictly by her, though. For a handful of lyrics, King passed things over to Toni Stern, who was recently in a relationship with James Taylor. After finding out that it was going to work out, Taylor left Stern midway through the recording of the album, eventually developing a relationship with Joni Mitchell.
If Stern couldn’t get her feelings out to Taylor, she figured the next best thing was to write about it. On ‘It’s Too Late’, it’s clear that Stern had been going through a major separation at the time, reminiscing about the time they had spent together and wondering if there was anything else they could have done to change things.
Granted, Stern was never going to be the one to air her dirty laundry out in public, either. When commenting on the song, Stern only said, “I won’t say who ‘It’s Too Late’ is about. I don’t kiss and tell”. Given where she was in her life at the time, it doesn’t exactly take a master matchmaker to put the pieces together to figure out the person at the heart of this.
Though King would sing the song, that didn’t dampen her relationship with Taylor. For the rest of the 1970s, King and Taylor would be frequent collaborators, including Taylor sitting in at her gigs from time to time on acoustic guitar.
As it turns out, Taylor would be one of the best ex-lovers to write a song about, with the Carly Simon classic ‘You’re So Vain’ also allegedly being written about him. If Taylor has any sort of malice towards either song, he’s rarely ever shown it, always having the utmost respect for King and even covering her song ‘You’ve Got a Friend’.
People can nitpick about whether this song is about Taylor forever, but it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. Given that no one was going to name names, the song stands on its own as a portrait of any love that’s gone sour. It might not be anybody’s fault, but that doesn’t make the hurt go away.