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Carole King: Fantasy

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Ode Records
Released: 1973
Time:
 40:33
Category: Pop, Blue-Eyed Soul, Soft Rock
Producer(s): Lou Adler
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.caroleking.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Fantasy Beginning (C.King) - 1:03
[2] You've Been Around Too Long (C.King) - 3:42
[3] Being at War With Each Other (C.King) - 3:27
[4] Directions (C.King) - 3:29
[5] That's How Things Go Down (C.King) - 3:01
[6] Weekdays (C.King) - 2:45
[7] Haywood (C.King) - 4:47
[8] A Quiet Place to Live (C.King) - 1:56
[9] Welfare Symphony (C.King) - 3:47
[10] You Light Up My Life (C.King) - 3:14
[11] Corazón (C.King) - 4:06
[12] Believe in Humanity (C.King) - 3:19
[13] Fantasy End (C.King) - 1:25

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Carole King - Guitar, Piano, Vocals, Arrangement

Danny Kortchmar - Guitar, Vocals
David T. Walker - Guitar
Charles Larkey - Bass Guitar
Susan Ranney - Bass Guitar
Harvey Mason, Sr. - Drums
Bobbye Hall - Percussion
Eddie Kendricks - Vocals
Tom Scott - Saxophone
Curtis Amy - Saxophone
Ernie Watts - Saxophone
Mike Altschul - Saxophone
Chuck Findley - Trumpet
Ollie Mitchell - Trumpet
Al Aarons - Trumpet
Charles Loper - Trombone
George Bohanon - Trombone
Richard Hyde - Trombone

Gordon Marron Strings
Ken Yerke - Violin
Barry Socher - Violin
Sheldon Sanov - Violin
Haim Shtrum - Violin
Kathleen Lenski - Violin
Miwako Watanabe - Violin
Glen Dicterow - Violin
Polly Sweeney - Violin
Robert Lipsett - Violin
Denyse Buffum - Violia
David Campbell - Violia
Alan Deveritch - Violia
Ronald Folsom - Violia
Jeffrey Solow - Cello
Judith Perett - Cello

Lou Adler - Producer
Hank Cicalo - Engineer
Steve Mitchell - Assistant Engineer
Chuck Beeson - Art Direction
Drew Struzan - Artwork

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Even in 1973, Carole King's landmark Tapestry album was still high on the charts. Fantasy was the first album to break the immediately recognizable, cozy sound set by Writer and made definitive by Tapestry. In the place of the warm, spare tones was a polished, soulful production. In many respects this album coasts on groove more than anything else. Sometimes it does work. "You've Been Around Too Long" comes off as subtle and accomplished, especially with David T. Walker's great guitar work. "Being at War with Each Other" pretty much covers well-worn ground. Those looking for Tapestry, Pt. 2 or 3 would come up empty, but the core of Fantasy does deliver on its idiosyncratic promise. "Corazón" has Latin intonations and King certainly doesn't embarrass herself. The album's best song by a long shot is "Believe in Humanity." On that track in particular all of the elements coalesce and might make listeners wish they took the harder sound and well-meaning messages even further, even for the hell of it. Some of the other tracks, most notably "Haywood," proves that although King knows the ins and outs of human nature, a story song isn't her forte. While the virtues of Music and Rhymes & Reasons tend to blur for some, Fantasy stands out as a risky and sometimes fulfilling effort.

Jason Elias - All Music Guide



The title means she's decided to step outside herself and write songs about imaginary situations, just like some Brill Building hack. A decision which seems to have brightened her music considerably. As for the situations themselves, well, what hath Walter Lippmann wrought? But the odd thing is that in the context of her junkie and housewife soap operas, her quest for "Directions" and "A Quiet Place to Live" could almost make you "Believe in Humanity." I said almost.

B

RobertChristgau.com



In the opening and title cut of Carole King's first, and I hope last, "conceptual" album, the format is made crystal clear: "I may step outside myself/And speak as if I were someone else/ ... In fantasy I can be black or white/A woman or a man." Subsequently we are treated alternately to a series of dramatic monologues, in some of which Carole King appears as herself, voicing personal hope and aspiration, but the majority featuring her as someone else, black, Latin American or otherwise, voicing the same sentiments. The whole adds up to a formalized song cycle in which the Carole King Institution issues its summary social and philosophical expression to date—one that eschews melody for orchestration and lyrical spontaneity for generalities—the overall impact being the equivalent of an early Sixties soap opera.

In five cuts, Carole King "fantasizes" an ethnic persona, for which she has single-handedly provided the most tepid, tokenistic "soul" backgrounds imaginable. "You've Been Around Too Long" expresses an early civil rights mentality: "... you've been around too long/Not to realize what's going on inside/I'm just like you/I'm doing the best that I can do to make my stride." "Directions" could just as easily be a bow to feminism as to black consciousness, its message being a catchall for malcontents: "Oooh, what does it get you/Stealing somebody else's pride/How much longer must I cry." "Haywood," the most detailed dramatic monologue of the album, is a well-meaning warning to a junkie friend: "Haywood, you been on the street again, I know, I know/Haywood, hangin' out with your so-called friends/What makes you think that you'll be the one to put it down...." "A Quiet Place to Live" envisages a ghetto-dweller's dream as the following: "All I want is a quiet place to live/Where I can enjoy the fruits of my labor/Read the paper/And not have to cry out loud." Then there is "Corazon," an unintentional travesty of Latin music.

In between these "someone else" monologues, Carole King speaks in her Institutional role as humanitarian empathist: "Everyone comes from one father one mother/So why do we complicate our lives so much/By being at war with each other" ("Being at War with Each Other"). In "That's How Things Go Down," she is a pregnant and potentially unwed mother and in "Weekdays" the mythical everyday housewife: "Heaven knows I can always watch the daytime shows/And wonder which story's mine." "Welfare Symphony" should be called "Welfare Sympathy," because that's all it is, sympathy without guts: "She often cried as they left her without a shred of pride." The all-conclusive summary cut has the embarrassingly preachy title, "Believe In Humanity." In it, Carole King tells us: "Maybe I'm living/With my head in the sand/I just want to see people giving/I want to believe in my fellow man."

Fine sentiments, but so what? Up through Rhymes And Reasons, Carole King wrote songs that, in their specificity of detail, personal revelation, and narrative force, embodied an extraordinary populist feeling and musical vitality. In Fantasy, with its run-on editing and calculated schematization, these qualities are transmuted into humanitarian rhetoric that affects deliverance without delivering. Carole King made it precisely because she didn't preach, didn't try to turn a phrase, wasn't a would-be producer of "art." Fantasy, though very listenable as background music, affects the resurrection as "art" of the essentially innocent approach to songwriting that made her what she is today, and it doesn't work.

Only one song, "You Light Up My Life," shows the luminescent, intimate King sensibility that made Tapestry, Music and Rhymes And Reasons so emotionally satisfying. The greatness of Carole King's songwriting career has been the self-contained, simple perfection of her individual songs, and their utter lack of pretentiousness. Here, the priorities are reversed. Orchestration that resembles, but that is vastly inferior to, Burt Bacharach's productions for Dionne Warwicke is substituted for melody. Easy homilies replace lyric necessity. In "Fantasy End," the album's coda, Carole King announces: "Now that I've expressed my soul/I'll step back into my real-life role." What, in heaven's name, should be the difference between Carole King's "soul" and her "real-life role"? Aren't they inevitably one-and-the-same? Apparently, Carole King has forgotten that they are, and no amount of well-meaning altruism can make up the difference. (RS 140)

STEPHEN HOLDEN - Aug 2, 1973
RollingStone.com



Fantasy is an album by American singer-songwriter Carole King, released in 1973. At the time of its release, it only reached #6 on the Billboard album chart, but has remained highly regarded by her fans over the ensuing decades. Presented as a sort of song cycle, the album opens and closes with two versions of the title song and the songs on each side segue directly into one another.

The Spanish language track "Corazón" (the Spanish word for "heart," also used as a term of endearment, as in this song's lyrics) was a moderate hit single from the album, as was "Believe in Humanity." The flip side of the latter single, "You Light Up My Life" (not the Debby Boone hit), charted separately from its A-side.

Wikipedia.org
 

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