A Quiet Place to Live” envisages a ghetto-dweller’s dream as the following: “All I want is a quiet place to live/Where I can enjoy the fruits of my labor/Read the paper/And not have to cry out loud. It's got the pleasant melancholy and strong melodies that characterize most Carole King albums, but there's an extra dose of grooviness here that, as another reviewer has mentioned, sounds inspired by Marvin Gaye's landmark What's Going On.

You can, in many ways, trace the idea of brill-building pop music as romantic artistic expression back to Ms. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Of course that doesn't mean the ballads aren't soulful;Carole's always were but "Directions","A Quiet Place" and even the softer "Being At War With Each Other" definately have it in abundance.As the years passed, it remained one of her most consistent sellers as more people discovered its uniqueness. There were problems in the ghettos ("Haywood" and "Welfare Symphony"), and the world's environment and very existence were in jeopardy ("Being At War With Each Other"). In between these “someone else” monologues, Carole King speaks in her Institutional role as humanitarian empathist: “Everyone comes from one father one mother/So why do we complicate our lives so much/By being at war with each other” (“Being at War with Each Other”). While several of the tracks went in different directions, such as “Being At War With Each Other” and “Welfare Symphony,” even they had a calm and peaceful feel to them.

While not immediately apparent, the appeal of Tapestry lies in Carole's brill building background, and the sound that she sought out as a solo artist is a sound which is very AM radio friendly (at times almost potentially verging on Carpenters levels of lush sweetness). What, in heaven’s name, should be the difference between Carole King’s “soul” and her “real-life role”? Elias regarded "Believe" as being the best song on the album, saying that "all of the elements coalesce and might make listeners wish they took the harder sound and well-meaning messages even further, even for the hell of it. In spite of everything already mentioned, the rest of Carole King's albums hold up well-enough on their own and are probably very overdue for a critical reappraisal.

The music overshadows the lyrics in many places, which are simpler and more straightforward than in the past. She continued to use a variety of supporting musicians, including guitarists Danny Kortchmar and Dave Walker, who form the foundation for her piano work, which was some of the best of her career. Presented as a sort of song cycle, the album opens and closes with two versions of the title song and the songs on each side segue directly into one another. All the songs are less sing along then previous Carole songs but that still doen't make this album bad it makes it better in fact because it shows how serious Carole is as an artist.

The album is more RnB as Carole has ever been and is very experimental from Caroles previous albums.Subsequently we are treated alternately to a series of dramatic monologues, in some of which Carole King appears as herself, voicing personal hope and aspiration, but the majority featuring her as someone else, black, Latin American or otherwise, voicing the same sentiments. That's a mood which is missing on all the rest of Carole's non- Tapestry records where too often it feels as though she's just simply going through the motions for the most part. Writing the entire album herself, without an outside lyricist, she moves away from the introspective songs of Tapestry and its immediate follow-ups to examine the lives of others, in particular of those less fortunate. There's not a bad track here, and the strongest, particularly the funkier ones like You've Been Around Too Long and Haywood, are just majestic.

Carole relates all of this news with her superhuman skills, writing all lyrics and music, playing all keyboards, singing everything including background vocals, and arranging and conducting the strings and horns.Not inner groove distortion but any time the levels get somewhat loud there especially the vocals break up. Well, I bring those previous points up because unlike the rest of Carole's discography which even with all the merits contained within has a habit of blending together, Fantasy kind of stands out as a singular statement in a way the albums before and after it don't (excluding Tapestry of course). Fantasy, though very listenable as background music, affects the resurrection as “art” of the essentially innocent approach to songwriting that made her what she is today, and it doesn’t work. Some may argue that the lyrics, and the solutions offered, are too simplistic, but I feel comfortable being presented with situations unaccompanied by too many details.