Carole King walked into A&M Studios on La Brea Avenue in January 1971 carrying somebody else's heartbreak. The lyric sheet for 'It's Too Late' had been handed to her by Toni Stern, a painter and poet who had recently ended her relationship with James Taylor, and the words had arrived fast. 'I wrote 'It's Too Late' in 20 minutes,' Stern told Sound Opinions, describing how she would present lyrics on a legal pad to King, who would then sit at the piano and have a melody within an hour or an hour and a half. That speed was craft, not carelessness. Two women in fluent collaboration, one of them pouring out a specific and very fresh wound, the other translating it into music with the same instinctive economy. The result was the defining single of 1971 and one of the most honest breakup songs the FM era ever produced. Stern died in February 2024 at age 79, and the song she wrote in twenty minutes outlasted everything.
The Laurel Canyon web that produced 'It's Too Late' is worth pausing on, because it makes the song's emotional texture richer. Stern had been in a relationship with Taylor, who moved on during the recording period. Taylor himself was a constant presence at A&M during the Tapestry sessions: he had encouraged King to perform her own songs, she had played piano in his touring band, and he and Joni Mitchell sang backing vocals on 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow?', credited on the sleeve as 'The Mitchell/Taylor Boy-and-Girl Choir.' So the man whose departure gave Stern the lyric was, at the same moment, harmonizing in the same building on the record that lyric would anchor. The Carpenters were recording their self-titled third album in Studio A. Mitchell was cutting 'Blue' in Studio C. The whole canyon was in one complex, and the sessions overlapped like rooms in a shared house.
Producer Lou Adler, who had founded King's label Ode Records, recorded the entire twelve-song album in three weeks, cutting two or three tracks a day. The studio budget was $22,000. Adler's philosophy for the record was deliberate restraint: he and engineer Hank Cicalo turned down the lights in Studio B and positioned the musicians as close together as they had been rehearsing in King's living room. The album used two drummers across its twelve tracks, Joel O'Brien and Russ Kunkel, with O'Brien handling 'It's Too Late.' 'Everything was supporting that voice and that piano,' Cicalo said. 'That's where the nucleus of the whole album was.' On 'It's Too Late' specifically, that nucleus is held in place by a rhythm section of Charlie Larkey on bass and Joel O'Brien on drums, with Curtis Amy's soprano saxophone adding a cool, almost-jazz color that keeps the song from ever tipping into melodrama.
Danny Kortchmar's guitar solo on 'It's Too Late' is one of the great accidental performances in the FM canon. It was played live off the floor, with no overdub. 'Carole just said, 'Play a solo here, Danny,'' Kortchmar recalled, 'not realizing that I was going to be listening to it for the rest of my life, in every drugstore, grocery shop, on the radio.' He initially thought it was too relaxed. He came around. 'That solo was absolutely right for the mood of the song. It served its purpose beautifully.' That relaxed quality is precisely the point: the song is about the exhaustion that comes after a relationship has already ended in everything but name. The solo breathes rather than argues, and that restraint is the whole argument.
The single was released in April 1971 as a double A-side with 'I Feel the Earth Move,' and both tracks climbed to number one together. 'It's Too Late' spent five weeks at number one on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Easy Listening chart, and Billboard ranked the double A-side the number three record of the year. At the 14th Annual Grammy Awards in 1972, it won Record of the Year, making King the first solo female artist to win that award on her own. King also took Song of the Year for 'You've Got a Friend' that evening, becoming the first woman ever to win in that category. The album itself won four Grammys, including Album of the Year. Tapestry eventually sold over 25 million copies worldwide and stayed on the US charts for more than six years.
What makes 'It's Too Late' worth returning to, past all the statistics, is the thing Robert Christgau identified when he wrote that 'if there's a truer song about breaking up than 'It's Too Late,' the world (or at least AM radio) isn't ready for it.' The lyric Stern wrote in twenty minutes carries no blame and no performance of grief. It describes a relationship that simply ran out, with two people still fond of each other and still unable to make it work. King, who had divorced her own songwriting partner Gerry Goffin in 1968 and crossed the country to rebuild herself in Los Angeles, understood every syllable. The song holds two women's experience at once, and neither one overwhelms the other. Stern is gone now, but the legal pad she handed across a piano bench in January 1971 is still doing its work.
