By 1976, Carole King had spent half a decade as the defining voice of the singer-songwriter era. Tapestry was still selling, and a new King album had arrived almost every year since. Thoroughbred, released in 1976, carried the lead single “Only Love Is Real” — a quiet milestone: her fourth and final number one on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart. It wasn’t a grand farewell. It was a gentle, assured record that sounded like an artist comfortable in her own skin — which is perhaps why it marked the end of an era so softly.
The song was written by King herself, and it bears her mid-70s signature: warm, unhurried, built on piano and synthesizer textures rather than the stark intimacy of Tapestry. Lou Adler, who had produced her since the beginning of her solo career, was again behind the board, and the Ode Records single was backed with “Still Here Thinking of You.” Released in February 1976, “Only Love Is Real” climbed to number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a respectable showing, but its real home was the Easy Listening chart, where it spent a week at number one in March 1976. It finished the year as the 40th biggest adult-contemporary hit of 1976.
The reviews were kind. Cash Box called it a “likable tune with a carefully constructed lyric,” adding that “like Dylan, Carole King understands the power of a subtle rhyme” — a comparison that says as much about King’s stature in 1976 as about the song. Record World praised it too. The praise is worth noting because King, by this point, was no longer the critics’ novelty; she was an institution, and the press treated her new singles with the respectful attention usually reserved for established masters.
The personnel on the record reads like a who’s who of the 1970s Los Angeles session scene. King herself played synthesizer and piano and sang lead and backing vocals. The guitars were handled by Waddy Wachtel and Danny Kortchmar — two of the defining session guitarists of the era, fresh from work with Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne. Russ Kunkel was on drums, Leland Sklar on bass, Tom Scott on saxophone, Ralph MacDonald on percussion. And the backing vocals came from an astonishing trio: David Crosby, Graham Nash, and JD Souther — harmony royalty, lending their voices to a song about love’s reality.
The album’s title, Thoroughbred — the breed of racehorse — suggests speed, breeding, and high performance. There’s an irony in it: by 1976, King was deliberately slowing down, stepping away from the relentless album-a-year pace and the pressure to repeat Tapestry. “Only Love Is Real,” with its unhurried groove and settled lyric, sounds like the work of someone who has stopped racing. The thoroughbred, it turns out, was learning to walk.
The song’s chart story is a small portrait of the mid-70s music business. The Hot 100, increasingly dominated by disco and arena rock, gave it a modest number 28. But the Easy Listening chart — the format where King’s audience actually lived — took it to number one for a week in March 1976. It was her fourth chart-topper on that survey, and it would be her last: the end of King’s run as a chart-topping singles artist, closing out one of the most remarkable five-year stretches in American pop.
The cast of players tells its own story about where Carole King stood in 1976. Wachtel and Kortchmar were the twin engines of the Los Angeles studio scene — the guitarists you called when you wanted a record to sound expensive and effortless. Kunkel and Sklar were the rhythm section behind half the hits coming out of California. That King could summon them, plus Crosby, Nash, and Souther for backing vocals, says everything about her standing: she wasn’t chasing the industry anymore. The industry came to her.
The B-side, “Still Here Thinking of You,” never got its own moment in the sun, and that’s a small shame — King B-sides from this period are a shadow catalog worth exploring. But the A-side’s modest Hot 100 peak tells a bigger story about 1976. Pop radio was pivoting hard toward disco and high-gloss rock, formats with little room for a piano woman singing about love’s reality. King didn’t chase the pivot. She made the record she wanted to make, for the audience that had never left her — and that audience took it to number one on the chart that mattered to them.
There’s a final irony worth sitting with. “Only Love Is Real” is a title that sounds like a conclusion — the last line of an argument, the moral of a story. In a sense it was: the last chart-topper of King’s imperial phase. She would keep writing, keep recording, keep performing for decades. But she would never again sit at the very center of the pop universe, and this song — calm, certain, unbothered — sounds like someone who already knows it and has made her peace.
What came after is well known to King fans: fewer albums, longer gaps between them, and eventually the long second act as a revered elder stateswoman — the Kennedy Center Honors, the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize, the Broadway musical Beautiful built around her life. “Only Love Is Real” sits at the hinge of that story: the last number one before the long, distinguished after. There’s something fitting in the title. After the fame, the sales, the prizes — only love is real. King seems to have believed it, and the record sounds like she did.
What to listen for
“Only Love Is Real” didn’t change pop history. It did something quieter: it closed a chapter with grace, at the top of the chart where Carole King belonged.