In 1971, Carole King was the most successful songwriter-turned-performer in America. Tapestry had made her a superstar, and its follow-up, Music, arrived that December with the impossible job of following a phenomenon. The album’s quietest triumph was a song King wrote with lyricist Toni Stern: “It’s Going to Take Some Time,” a gentle, clear-eyed ballad about recovering from a broken heart. King recorded it first. But the version the world remembers belongs to the Carpenters, who turned it into a top-twenty hit the following spring — and one of the most emotionally intelligent singles of their career.
The songwriting partnership behind it is worth knowing. Toni Stern was one of King’s key collaborators in the early 1970s, a lyricist with a gift for plainspoken emotional precision. Together they wrote songs that said complicated things simply — and “It’s Going to Take Some Time” may be their purest distillation of that gift. The lyric doesn’t dramatize heartbreak; it normalizes recovery. It’s about the unglamorous middle of getting over someone: not the crying, not the triumph, but the slow, daily work of becoming yourself again. Musicologist James E. Perone has noted how the song’s syncopated rhythms seem to mirror that recovery process — the music itself stumbling forward, finding its footing, steadying.
King’s own version, recorded for Music, is spare and intimate — just her voice, her piano, and the song. It was the Carpenters who heard the hit inside it. Richard Carpenter, sifting through a stack of 7-inch singles, pulled out King’s record and knew immediately it would be a hit for the duo. He was right — and the arrangement he built around it is one of his finest.
Released on April 13, 1972, as a single from A Song for You, the Carpenters’ version was produced by Jack Daugherty with “Flat Baroque” on the B-side. The personnel reads like a roll call of the great Los Angeles session world: Karen Carpenter on lead vocals, Richard on backing vocals, Wurlitzer, piano, and arrangement, Joe Osborn on bass, and Hal Blaine on drums. The secret weapons were the flutes — Tim Weisberg on bass flute and Bob Messenger’s alto flute solo, a woodwind break of unusual delicacy for a pop single. It gave the record its airy, floating quality, the sound of someone breathing easier.
The single climbed to number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 2 on the US adult contemporary chart, number 14 in Canada, and number 1 on Canada’s adult contemporary chart. For the Carpenters, it was another in their extraordinary run of early-70s hits — but it’s the rare one that feels like it belongs as much to the songwriter as to the singers. Jessie Mueller, who played King in the Broadway musical Beautiful, has counted it among her favorite King songs, a testament to how deeply it lives in the King canon despite being a bigger hit for someone else.
The song kept traveling. Jazz flutist Richard “Groove” Holmes recorded an instrumental version for his 1973 album Night Glider — a natural fit, given how much of the Carpenters’ arrangement already leaned on woodwinds. Two decades later, Dishwalla covered it for the 1994 Carpenters tribute album If I Were a Carpenter, dragging the gentle ballad into the alternative-rock era and proving its bones could take the weight. Few songs from the singer-songwriter era have been so thoroughly adopted by other genres without losing their essential character.
A Song for You was the Carpenters’ third studio album and their most ambitious to date, a record on which Richard Carpenter stretched beyond the duo’s established soft-pop template toward Bacharach, Leon Russell, and now Carole King. Placing “It’s Going to Take Some Time” near the album’s emotional center was a statement: here was the biggest-selling sibling act in America building an album around a song about patience and recovery. It worked because Karen Carpenter sang it like she understood it — no small thing for a twenty-two-year-old whose own emotional life was far more complicated than her public image allowed.
King and Stern would keep writing together through the early seventies, but few of their songs traveled as far as this one. There’s a reason: the lyric is built on one of the hardest tricks in songwriting, saying something true without saying something clever. No metaphors strain for effect; no images call attention to themselves. Just the plain fact that healing takes the time it takes — set to a melody that arrives like a hand on your shoulder.
The single’s adult-contemporary performance — number two in the US, number one in Canada — hinted at where King’s own future as a performer was heading: the mellow middle of the dial, where she would score her last big hits of the decade.
There’s a broader point here about King’s catalog. She is remembered, rightly, as the voice of Tapestry — but her songs have always belonged to a wider world. “It’s Going to Take Some Time” is one of a dozen King compositions that became definitive in other artists’ hands, and it may be the most quietly radical of them: a hit single about patience. Pop music loves the extremes of heartbreak — the devastation, the revenge, the triumph. This song honors the middle. It says: healing isn’t an event, it’s a process. It’s going to take some time.
What to listen for
“It’s Going to Take Some Time” endures because it tells the truth about something pop usually lies about: getting over someone. Not with a bang but with time, patience, and a melody that steadies as it goes.