When Carole King left Gerry Goffin in 1968 she lost not only a husband but also her songwriting partner. As a hit-making team in which King provided the music and Goffin the words, they had together composed a string of memorable songs, from the Shirelles’ Will You Love Me Tomorrow to Aretha Franklin’s A Natural Woman via the Drifters’ Up on the Roof.
Indeed, they put their names to so many hits that inspired the Beatles’ early career that John Lennon remarked that his ambition was that the Lennon-McCartney credit should become “the Goffin-King of England”.
The couple’s separation left King in search of a new lyricist — and she found a perfect partner in Toni Stern. Among the songs they went on to write together were Where You Lead, on King’s 1971 multimillion-selling album Tapestry, and the record’s break-out hit single It’s Too Late.
The latter chronicled the end of a love affair with a bittersweet wistfulness, reflecting Stern’s recent break-up with the singer-songwriter James Taylor. King also recognised aspects of her own broken marriage in Stern’s words and, when she set them to music, one of the greatest break-up songs of all time was born.
The two women lived close to each other in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, and in a 2019 interview Stern described the simplicity of how they worked together. “I’d go to her house or she’d come to my house,” she recalled. “I’d present her with an entire lyric on a large legal pad and she’d put it on the piano. Within an hour or an hour and a half at most, the entire song was written, including all the riffs and licks and hooks you hear on the finished record.”
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King confirmed that was exactly how they had come up with It’s Too Late. “I remember sitting down at the piano with the lyrics on the stand and hearing the music come out of me pretty much as you hear it on Tapestry,” she said.
Stern would go on to become a published poet but the lyrics she wrote for King were her first serious attempts at writing. “Carole was my very first reader,” she said. “I was a complete unknown. You might say I started at the top. I didn’t even know if the lyrics I created could be fashioned into song.”
King also wrote some of the lyrics on Tapestry. It was her first attempt to do so and she credited Stern with showing her the way. “Toni was wonderful help with the transition from writing with Gerry to writing songs on my own. I didn’t have the courage initially,” she said.
Stern’s lyrics graced King’s first four solo albums and together they also wrote It’s Going to Take Some Time which became a hit for the Carpenters. Their collaboration came to an end in 1973 but the two women remained close friends and King wrote a personal endorsement to Stern’s fourth book of verse, The Wet Clay of My Heart, published last year.
Toni Kathrin Stern was born in 1944 in Los Angeles, the son of Audrey (née Johnson), an apartment block manager, and Harry Stern, a travelling salesman. She was educated at Hollywood High School and Los Angeles City College; by the mid-1960s she had moved to Paris to study painting. On her return to LA, she showed some poems-cum-lyrics she had written to Bert Schneider, a family friend and co-creator of the Monkees. Schneider in turn showed them to King, who on separating from her husband had just moved to California from New Jersey to start a new life. Schneider offered to introduce the two women.
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Although their East Coast and West Coast temperaments were very different, they hit it off instantly. “She was the epitome of a free-spirited Laurel Canyon woman,” King said of Stern. “She lived in a hillside house with her dog, Arf, surrounded by books, record albums, plants and macramé.”
“I’m sure there was a California quality in me that appealed to Carole,” Stern said. “She was moving from a familial, middle-class lifestyle to Laurel Canyon, where she started to let her hair down, literally and figuratively. We worked off our contrasts.”
The first song they wrote together was As We Go Along, which was recorded by the Monkees and included in the group’s surreal 1968 film Head.
According to Stern’s husband Jerry Rounds, who survives her, she ultimately decided that the “hustle” of the music industry was not for her. Instead she directed her creativity into painting and poetry, publishing four books of verse. Her editor, Trish Reynales, told The New York Times that her poetry “explores small everyday pleasures and the unknowable, together in a place of abstraction and clarity, without excess, heaviness or tension”.
However, she had one last musical contribution to make when Where You Lead was used as the theme song to the critically acclaimed television series Gilmore Girls, which ran for seven seasons between 2000 and 2007. Stern’s original words as sung by King on Tapestry had a traditional stand-by-your-man theme that was not considered suitable for a more liberated era, so Stern reworked the lyric to celebrate the relationship between a mother and her daughter. King then re-recorded the song for the TV series as a duet with her own daughter, Louise Goffin.
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Toni Stern, lyricist and poet, was born on November 4, 1944. She died of undisclosed causes on January 17, 2024, aged 79