This song is about being there for others and being a friend for someone in need. Along with Tapestry tracks like "So Far Away" and "Home Again," it is a reflection on how friends can be just as important as family. King said the song "was as close to pure inspiration as I've ever experienced. The song wrote itself. It was written by something outside of myself, through me."
Carole King's good friend James Taylor played acoustic guitar on five songs from the album, including this one. Taylor recorded his own version of the song on his album Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon, which he was recording nearby while King was working on Tapestry; Danny Kortchmar , who was in King's band The City and was good friends with Taylor, played congas on both versions and added acoustic guitar to Taylor's redition.
Taylor's version came out as a single in April of 1971, and became a huge hit, going all the way to #1 in the US by July and hitting #4 in the UK. When Tapestry was first released, Taylor was a much bigger star than King, and in the spring of 1971, they toured together with King opening for Taylor.
The song was never a hit for King, since she didn't release it as a single (James Taylor got there first), but the album was a smash, spending 15 weeks at #1 in the US and 302 weeks (that's six years) on the charts, making it the longest-charting album by any female solo artist. To this day, many singer-songwriters cite the album as an influence. What's even more impressive is that the album was made in about two weeks for around $15,000, with producer Lou Adler keeping the production to a minimum to get a clean, warm sound.
The Tapestry album was produced by Lou Adler, who owned King's label Ode Records. In a recorded conversation with Adler in 1972, King explained: "I didn't write it with James or anybody really specifically in mind. But when James heard it he really liked it and wanted to record it. At that point when I actually saw James hear it, I watched James hear the song, and his reaction to it. It then became special to me because of him, you know, and the relationship to him. And it is very meaningful in that way but at the time that I wrote it. Again, I almost didn't write it. When I write my own lyrics I'm conscious of trying to polish it off but all the inspiration is really inspiration, really comes from somewhere else. That was because his album Sweet Baby James was recorded the month before Tapestry was recorded I think. Or even possibly simultaneously. Parts of it were simultaneous. And it was like Sweet Baby James flowed over to Tapestry and it was like one continuos album in my head. We were all just sitting around playing together and some of them were his songs and some of them were mine."
Taylor's version won a Grammy for Song of the Year, an award that went to King as the songwriter. This made King the first woman to hit the Grammy "Grand Slam": Record of the Year ("It's Too Late"), Album of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal (Tapestry), and Song of the Year ("You've Got A Friend"). Taylor's version also won Best Male Pop Vocal.
King, who had a case of stage freight and did what she could to avoid the media, didn't go to the ceremony. Her producer Lou Adler accepted the awards for her and had to call her to tell her she won.
Roberta Flack and Donnie Hathaway recorded the song as a duet and released it around the same time as Taylor. Their version hit #29 in the US, and started a successful partnership between Flack and Hathaway, who teamed up for an album of duets in 1972 that included the hit "Where Is The Love?" Other artists to cover the song include Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Anne Murray, Tom Jones, and Al Green.
Ready for some musical analysis of this song? Jeremy Gilien, who has a Master's degree in Music Composition from California State University, Los Angeles, and was Josh Groban's music teacher in high school, explains: "Carole King on Tapestry utilized harmonies popularized by Holland-Dozier-Holland in the Motown sound, especially major sevenths to sweeten, and minor sevenths to warm the sound. She employed extended dominant harmonies, such as chords of the 9th, 11th, and 13th, in lieu of traditional 7th chords at half cadence points preceding choruses. A feature which is a fairly frequent characteristic of her formal songwriting structure is to begin a song in a minor key and then find her way into a sunnier, major region before returning again to minor. This method can be heard in such songs as 'It's Too Late', 'I Feel the Earth Move', 'You've Got a Friend', and 'Beautiful'. The absence of an orchestra or large string section, and inclusion of finely crafted instrumental solo breaks, lend a sparse intimacy and a solidarity with the band-oriented rock music that Lou Adler produced. The quality of her voice did not compare with that of a first rank R&B or blues singer, but she used her understanding and placement of idiomatic vocal ornamentation to supply the 'soul' that her natural limitations had not equipped her with. Her sound was sensitive, unique, endearing, and certainly a far cry from what we would think of as a typical 'songwriters' voice." (Quotes and research come from Harvey Kubernik's piece on Rock's Backpages .)
In 2005, the British pop band McFly released this as the flip side of their #1 UK single "All About You." Proceeds from the single went to charity through Comic Relief.
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