Tapestry does not ease you in. Before Carole King has sung a word of confession or loss, she is rocking at her piano, announcing that the ground moves under her feet and the sky comes tumbling down whenever her lover is near. I Feel the Earth Move is the album’s front door — three minutes of joyous, pounding desire from a writer the industry had filed away as a supplier of other people’s hits. It was chosen as the A-side of the album’s first single, and for a few weeks in the spring of 1971 it was the record America heard. Then disc jockeys turned the disc over, found It’s Too Late on the other side, and the flip side swallowed the hit. The strange part is that nobody really lost: the two songs were fused into one of the biggest double A-sided singles in pop history.
Writing the Earth Moving
King wrote I Feel the Earth Move entirely herself, words and music, and it shows in the way the lyric and the groove are welded together. Scholar James Perone pointed to the moment King sings “tumbling down”: the syncopation shoves the accent onto the end of the word, so the melody literally trips over itself — a musical tumble built into the tune. Everything in the writing works that way. The tempo pushes, the piano hammers, and the desire in the lyric is carried less by what is said than by the sheer physical momentum of saying it.
The trade papers heard the single the same way. Cash Box greeted it as a forceful “earthquake song,” and judged its pairing with It’s Too Late on one disc to be “double dynamite”; Record World called it quality contemporary pop. Both magazines were trade sheets, professionally allergic to hype, and both understood that the record’s racket was the point: this was a songwriter famous for other people’s ballads opening her own album at a sprint.
Contemporary critics noticed the temperature. Reviewing Tapestry for Rolling Stone in April 1971, Jon Landau praised the way King’s voice on this track travels from “raunchy” to “bluesy” to “harsh” to “soothing,” tracking the melody’s own journey. Music historian Harvey Kubernik later called it probably the most sexually aggressive song on the album — a brave way to open a record otherwise devoted to what he termed mellow confessionality. AllMusic’s Stewart Mason described it as the ultimate in hippie-chick eroticism, the sound of an entire generation of soft-spoken college girls letting their hair down, and he credited the record’s impact to its piano-led groove and to a vocal that sounds like a woman discovering, in real time, how much noise she is allowed to make. Rolling Stone, revisiting the album forty years on, concluded that King’s “warm, earnest singing” brought an “earthy joy” to the track — a phrase that catches the record’s double nature: it is a love song, but it is also a declaration of independence from the demure girl-group scripts King had spent a decade writing for other singers. It is worth remembering that this “aggressive” performance came from a 29-year-old divorced mother of two who, a few years earlier, had been told her own voice was not commercial enough for the songs she wrote.
A Piano Record, Not a Guitar Record
The Tapestry sessions took place at A&M Studios in Hollywood in January 1971, and the building itself has become part of the album’s legend. King was working in Studio B with engineer Hank Cicalo; in Studio A, the Carpenters were recording their third album, while in Studio C Joni Mitchell was making Blue. Several of King’s musicians were simultaneously playing on James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon across the same weeks, and the three projects shared players, corridors and coffee — a whole movement of Californian soft rock gestating in one building in a single month. Producer Lou Adler deliberately built King’s record around her piano. Perone credits that decision — foregrounding the keys rather than the guitar-led sound of King’s previous album, Writer — as central to the album’s identity. On I Feel the Earth Move the band is stripped to essentials: King on keyboards and vocals, Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar on electric guitar, Charles Larkey on bass, and Joel O’Brien on drums. There are no strings, no choir, no Brill Building varnish. The earthquake is a four-piece band and a left hand that will not sit still.
That economy mattered. King had spent the 1960s writing for full orchestras and girl groups, but on this track she proved the opposite point: four musicians who trusted the song — and a singer who wrote it, played it, and clearly meant every word — could sound bigger than a studio full of session men reading charts.
The Flip Heard Round the Charts
Persuaded by the track’s energy, Ode Records made I Feel the Earth Move the A-side of Tapestry’s first single, released on April 16, 1971. It picked up airplay — and then something unpredictable happened. DJs and listeners began favouring the flip, the slow, devastating It’s Too Late. For a while both sides drew spins, but the B-side steadily took over. Because Billboard treated the disc as a double A-side, the single is officially credited with five weeks at number one on the Hot 100 beginning with the chart dated June 19, 1971, and a number six peak in Britain. Cash Box, which still tracked each side separately, told the truer story of the flip: It’s Too Late spent four weeks at number one on its chart, while I Feel the Earth Move did not register at all.
Nor was the A-side neglected by the accountants: in its own right, I Feel the Earth Move earned a gold certification in the United States and a silver one in Britain. And it was working hard on stage as well as on the radio. King performed at Carnegie Hall on June 18, 1971 — the night before the single reached number one — in a concert eventually released as a live album, with the song in its accustomed place at the front of the show, announcing the new Carole King before the confessionals began.
Historians have been kind to the “loser.” Together, the two songs were named by the RIAA among its Songs of the Century, and both were ranked as the joint number three record of 1971 by Billboard. In practice the pairing was a perfect commercial accident: one side for the morning after, one side for the night before, and a public that bought the same 45 for opposite moods.
After the Earthquake: Martika and the Aftershocks
The song’s afterlife has been almost as eventful as its chart run. In 1989 the American singer Martika, fresh from the number one success of Toy Soldiers, released a bright dance-pop cover that reached number two in Australia, number seven in Britain, and number twenty-five on the Billboard Hot 100. Then, in October 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck Northern California during the World Series — and American radio stations, deciding that an earthquake song was suddenly in poor taste, pulled Martika’s record from their playlists. Its chart run collapsed. It remains one of the strangest examples of real life reaching into the charts and switching a hit off. The British group Big Fun had recorded the song for release the same year; their version was cancelled outright because of Martika’s, surfacing only as an album bonus track.
There is a final irony in the flip-side story. Ode’s executives chose I Feel the Earth Move to lead the single campaign because it sounded like the hit — upbeat, immediate, unmistakably commercial. They were not wrong about the song; they were wrong only about the season. The summer of 1971 belonged to the slow side, to confession rather than celebration, and the album the single came from was precisely about that shift in the culture’s mood. The upbeat opener did its real work where King had placed it: first on the album, where it still functions as the manifesto of a writer stepping out from behind other people’s voices and announcing, at the top of her lungs, that the ground had moved.
King’s original, meanwhile, never left the culture. It opens one of the best-selling albums ever made — Tapestry has been certified fourteen times platinum in the United States and spent more than six years on the American album chart — and it was still being quoted decades later: Tori Amos told Mojo that King’s songs are “like stories or sonic movies,” singling out I Feel the Earth Move and It’s Too Late as songs you want to walk into. In 2015 the television series Glee mashed the song up with Alanis Morissette’s Hand in My Pocket in its Tapestry tribute episode. And when King performed Tapestry in its entirety for the first time, at London’s Hyde Park in 2016, I Feel the Earth Move stood exactly where she had put it in 1971 — the flip side that became an A-side that became a footnote that became a standard: first, loudest, and impossible to sit still through.