By Helen Brown Last Updated: 5:05PM BST 22 Apr 2009  Carole King Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY  Bare foot stretching casually toward the camera, wavy brown curls tumbling over her shoulders and needlework in hand, Carole King sat on a window sill in California 38 years ago posing for a photograph that would appear on the sleeve of a album destined to spend the following six years on the American charts, selling 24 million copies worldwide.  Picking up a copy of Tapestry today as it is re-released, King, now 67, smiles. "This really was my living room in Laurel Canyon. These were my old Indian print curtains and my cat, Telemachus." She strokes the long-dead tabby's head with an affectionate thumb.  What do you think when you look at yourself back then? "Oh, she was soooo young! She thought she was so confident and in control."  So young – 29 – but the girl on the windowsill already had many hits behind her. King was only 14 when she began taking the subway from Brooklyn to show her songs around the record companies. The melodies were strong, but she admits to being "lyrically challenged" at that age, padding out notes with "Ooh babys" and "Bum doobie doo wops" until she met lyricist Gerry Goffin at college in New York.  Working at Aldon Music, a competitive musical hothouse next door to the Brill Building, the pair would go on to become one of the greatest songwriting duos of all time, turning such standards as Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? for the Shirelles, Take Good Care of My Baby for Bobby Vee, The Loco-Motion for Little Eva, Up on the Roof for the Drifters, I'm Into Something Good for Herman's Hermits, Goin' Back for Dusty Springfield, Pleasant Valley Sunday for the Monkees and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman for Aretha Franklin.  Goffin's lyrics captured the zeitgeist, with Will You Love Me Tomorrow? released in the same year that the Pill became available. Songs like this revealed Goffin's extraordinary talent for expressing feminine emotions. Was this because King was so articulate about her own experience? "No! I wasn't at all," she says. "Would that he had understood better."  For, just as each of King's catchy tunes had a melancholy undertow, so the golden couple were falling apart. They'd married hastily after King got pregnant at 17. A new biography by Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us, reveals the extent of Goffin's infidelity, telling how King ended up helping to buy a house for one of Goffin's mistresses and her child by him.  Weller argues that female songwriters such as King blazed a trail through a sexist industry. But King tells me she had no sense of that. "I was never told, 'You can't do this because you're a woman.' I never thought about it. My parents always told me I could be anything I wanted to be."  But she did know she was different. "Living with Gerry in New Jersey suburbia I was surrounded by the wives of doctors, accountants, lawyers. With a pen in one hand and a baby in the other I was a real oddity. A working woman."  After divorcing Goffin in 1968, the mother of two moved to Laurel Canyon in California to join the bohemian singer-songwriter set that included James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. In this creative community, King met female lyricist Toni Stern, with whom she co-wrote one of the world's greatest break-up songs, It's Too Late.  "Toni was wonderful help with the transition from writing with Gerry to writing songs on my own," says King. "I didn't have the courage initially. James inspired me a lot. I write heavily under the influence of James Taylor."  Her first solo release, Writer, got a good critical response. But the mix of older Goffin/King numbers and new material on 1971's Tapestry hit a chord with the world. As another Brill Building songwriter of the era, Cynthia Weil, said: "Carole spoke from her heart, and she happened to be in tune with the mass psyche. People were looking for a message, and she came to them with a message that was exactly what they were looking for."  New songs included the stompingly liberated I Feel the Earth Move, It's Too Late and the warm, mellow You've Got a Friend, which also became a hit for Taylor. Both Taylor and Mitchell appear on Tapestry. King also enjoyed "reclaiming" her old songs for her own voice. Her rendition of Will You Love Me Tomorrow? is far sadder and wiser than the Shirelles' version.  Although King's professional life was soaring at this point, Weller's book reveals that her second marriage to bass-player Charlie Larkey (with whom she had another two children) was soon to founder. Her third husband, musician Rick Evers, died of a heroin overdose in the late Seventies, and she is now divorced from her fourth husband, Idaho rancher Rick Sorenson. Weller argues that part of the reason for the failed romances lies in her husbands' failure to accept her success.  King won't discuss the subject today. However, she says she is writing an autobiography that will include "all the fun stuff – hanging out with Paul McCartney, John Lennon and James Taylor. But also, yes, the marriages."  She plans to call the book Natural Woman. The title seems apt for the musician-turned-environmental activist. But has the earth-mother image ever chafed? "Hell, no," she chuckles. "It's who I am, honey."  And she looks fabulous for it. Energetic, engaged, full of enthusiastic praise for the young bands she met on the Jools Holland show: Franz Ferdinand, the Mummers, the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, she's truly inspiring. How does she do it?  "When I wake up every morning, I smile and say, 'Thank you.' Because out of my window I can see the mountains, then go hiking with my dog and share her bounding joy in the world."  She looks at the sleeve of Tapestry. If King could go back in time and tell her younger self anything, what would it be? "You're going to have a very rich and wonderful life."
As Carole King's 'Tapestry' &ndash; one of the bestselling solo albums of all time &ndash;    is re-released, the singer-songwriter talks about her hit-making and her    relationships.