Someone's Carole King

"Next to mine and Phil's, she knows your voice best," Emily told me, holding her tiny 5-week-old daughter Harper in her arms.  "We listen to your CDs all the time!"

I remember vividly the music my mother and father played for me when I was very small.  There was a surfeit of classical music, for which I'll always be grateful:  Beethoven, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky (my favorite), Dukas, Gershwin, Copland, Wagner, Rossini, Haydn, Dvorak...the list goes on. 

There was the music my mother loved and sang to me, sang along with when she played it for me:  The Beatles, Carly Simon, John Denver, James Taylor, Simon & Garfunkel, The Mamas & the Papas, Marvin Gaye, and Carole King. 

There was the music my father loved passionately, which half the time had no words, but almost always had a horn section:  Ray Charles, Canadian Brass, Dizzy Gillespie, Chicago, Dave Brubeck, and Louis Armstrong. 

I came to love all of this music on my own, and I've been adding colors and flavors and elements to this childhood baseline, pun intended, ever since.

In the past few years, so many of my friends and fans have had children, have been raising children, have sent loved ones off to war, have gone to war.  Stories come back to me on the wind, or spoken with love and smiles:  whole groups of soldiers falling asleep to my music overseas, comforted for a while; a small knot of the newest generation of great thinkers and movers and shakers, with me for their lullaby as well, every night. 

This is why I sing.
This is why I do what I do.
I will never tire of these stories, this news.
I will never stop smiling at the wonder of the power music holds, the good that it can do.

I may never grow out of the humbleness that comes over me when I hear from a soldier, or from someone who loves him/her, that his/her whole squad is rocking out to, or gets rocked to sleep by, an album of mine, in a hostile place where, in my mind, they really should not have to go, where comforts are few.

I may never be able to speak of how amazing it is to know that there are mothers who love my voice and my work enough to feed it happily to their own children, to let my work influence their own life's work, the way that my mother and father fed their favorite music to me.

I am someone's Carole King. 

This is my happy thought today.  This will carry me through a whole lot of despair, should it ever come.  I am doing what I set out to do.  I am making a difference.  I am making someone's life better by being myself, sharing my art. 

What more could I ever want? 


Today is my lover's birthday.  Happy 34th, Kevin!  I love you, and I'm so glad you're here.