Carole King was 18 years old when she wrote the famous question. She and her husband Gerry Goffin were staff songwriters at Aldon Music in New York — she wrote the melodies, he wrote the words — and their boss Don Kirshner assigned them to write a follow-up single for the Shirelles. Goffin wrote the first verse about a young woman lying awake the morning after, plagued by wondering whether the night before had meant anything. King heard it, and the music came almost immediately. They finished the song in one sitting. It asked a question everyone already knew how to ask. They gave it to the Shirelles, and the lead singer, Shirley Owens, heard it and said no. It sounded too country. She didn’t want to record it.
The producer, Luther Dixon, talked Owens into it by adding strings. The Shirelles recorded it, and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was released in November 1960 and hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the first time a girl group had ever topped that chart. Goffin and King quit their day jobs the following week. For the rest of the decade they wrote hit after hit for other artists. King wrote the music for Aretha Franklin‘s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” in 1967 and never stood at a microphone to perform it herself. The reason was simple. She was terrified of performing live. Her stage fright was so severe that The City — the band she formed with bassist Charles Larkey in 1968 — canceled their only scheduled show at the Troubadour and never played live once. “She was very against playing live at that point,” guitarist Danny Kortchmar said later. “She had such stage fright. We never did any gigs.”
James Taylor changed that. He’d hired King as his touring pianist and night after night he stepped aside on stage and invited her into the spotlight. The turning point was the moment he brought her out to perform “Up on the Roof” in front of his audience for the first time. She got through it. She kept going. “Writing songs for others felt safe,” King said later. “But singing them myself required a new level of confidence.” That confidence — hard-won and specific — is what she brought into the studio in January 1971 when she recorded Tapestry with producer Lou Adler.
Related: Linda Ronstadt Rejected Don Henley’s Songs But Hired Him as a Drummer — What Was Left Became ‘Hotel California’
The session was unlike anything happening in American music at that moment. King was in Studio B of A&M Studios in Hollywood. Joni Mitchell was recording Blue in Studio C down the hall. The Carpenters were in Studio A. Three albums that would define the decade were being made at the same time in the same building and nobody outside those hallways knew it yet. Mitchell walked down the hall between her own sessions and added her voice to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” Her part and Taylor’s — who also played guitar and sang on the track — were recorded on separate audio channels. Their voices are never actually mixed together on the finished track. They exist in parallel.
King sat at the piano and sang the question she’d written at 18, given away and not sung publicly for eleven years. She was 28 – almost 29. She’d written songs about every kind of love and loss without anyone knowing they were hers. Critic David Hepworth later described the difference between the two versions precisely: the Shirelles’ recording sounds like a teenager’s plea while King’s sounds like a mature woman who already knows the answer and is asking anyway.
The Same Song Eleven Years Later
Tapestry spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for over six years. It has sold over 25 million copies. “It’s Too Late” was released as a single from Tapestry in April 1971. It has been covered more than a dozen times since.
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is touring worldwide through 2027. Gerry Goffin — who wrote the words she sang that January in Studio B — left no known public record of what he thought when he heard his own lyrics come back to him that way. The question Carole King wrote at 18 for a girl group that didn’t want it is still being asked. It just sounds different depending on how old you are when you’re asking it.
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