Free Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller Page B

Donny. In their tight, two-person universe—small apartment, no-sleep schedule, paycheck-to-paycheck existence, demanding baby, pump-’em-out songwriting—they had almost become one person. With his voyeur’s knack, Gerry could intuit the feelings of his young wife, who kept her emotions hidden.
    Kirshner worked by pitching to one or two artists’ managers or A&R men at a time. He knew he could get to Florence Greenberg, so he told Carole to think of the Shirelles as she wrote. Still, Florence was too easy a sell— she had come to him —and Donny wanted what he couldn’t have; he was secretly obsessed with selling songs to Guy Mitchell, who, having engineered Johnny Mathis’s string of hits, was the hottest A&R man on the street. Carole didn’t know this. She thought of the Shirelles as she sat down at the piano.
    Carole stretched her hands over the keys. She produced an elegant semiclassical ballad, its third bar containing an emotional chord (called the “major III” or “secondary dominant of VI”) that George Gershwin might have used but that was never heard in current pop songs. She had trouble finding a melody for the bridge, so she left that incomplete. After finishing the song as best she could, she pushed the “on” button on the big Norelco tape recorder that sat on the piano next to the full ashtray, and she da-dah-dah’ d her wordless melody while she played it. As she grabbed her coat to go meet Genie, she wrote a note to Gerry: “Donny needs a song for the Shirelles tomorrow. Please write”—and propped the note against the tape recorder.
    When Gerry came home to the empty apartment and listened to the tape, he was euphoric. “I had never heard a melody like that from Carole before! It was melodic !” he recalls. “It was structured better musically than anything she’d written before—it was AABA; the others had been: verse, chorus, verse, chorus. I listened to it a few times, then I put myself in the place of a woman—yes, it was sort of autobiographical. I thought: What would a girl sing to a guy if they made love that night? It wasn’t a great lyric, but it was very simple: Will you love me in the morning, after we’ve made love?”
    Gerry showed the lyric to Carole when she walked in the door around midnight. He’d begun the song with decorous metaphors for lovemaking, arranged in a tight, alliterative, conversational two bars (“Tonight you’re mine completely / You give your love so sweetly”); and he’d filled her Gershwin-like third-bar melody with a triple rhyme—“To night the light of love is in your eyes, ” to reinforce the urgency of its quickened last six beats. He’d also written the bridge melody (with a yearning third bar) and its lyric about heartbreak with the morning sun. Carole picked it out on the piano, following along as he sang it. Working until two a.m., they nailed it.
    The song (which they temporarily called, simply, “Tomorrow”) was about a young woman sleeping with a boy despite no promise of commitment. Channeling the sensibility of the matter-of-fact, emotion-hiding girl who fell in love with him a year and a half earlier, Gerry wrote a whole character. The words tell us the singer is a cut-to-the-chase person who, despite her vulnerability, possesses restraint—she’s not demanding constant reassurance. She also accepts responsibility for her freedom; it’s her job to manage the emotional ambiguity and the risk of pregnancy. It’s not a supplicant’s “ Please tell me now” or an arm-twisting “ Just tell me now.” It’s “ So tell me now,” implying, I’ll take it from here; the burden is now on me. Because it reflected them so effortlessly, Gerry says, “We just thought it was another song.”
    Donny Kirshner helped Carole and Gerry fortify the hook and shorten