(Credits: Far Out / Oleg Ivanov)
Tue 2 September 2025 22:00, UK
1971 was a new dawn. But unlike the hangover of the 1960s, as it came to be known by counterculture loyalists, it was a change most people hadn’t known they’d needed.
Starting with Joni Mitchell, ‘71 proved to be a place where only those embracing the leftover perils of the ‘60s could thrive. Often, as it is now, it’s seen as a huge risk to spotlight your insecurities or your uncertainties. And most people whose tentative descent into the ‘70s was marked by immense trepidation felt that talking about it would be one sure way to kill their careers.
But Mitchell proved that hiding away from your fears would be worse career suicide than leaning into them, and so she ruminated on everything they’d lost and everything she’d lost, pouring her heart into Blue without sidestepping any of the harsher details. For many, ‘71 came with the harsh winds of unavoidable disillusionment, but here was a way to use that strange displacement and dissonance and make it into timeless art.
That wasn’t all that came out of this particular year. While Mitchell and a handful of other singer-songwriters were showing how to be brave, others were gearing up with more of a bite, with Queen ramping up to change the boundaries of rock, and Black Sabbath chancing the power of darkness in a new swirl the world would soon celebrate as the birth of heavy metal. In another corner of the ring were people like Elton John, whose first prog rock foray in Madman Across the Water unknowingly set him off to becoming the vibrant glam rock powerhouse we’d all meet and love.
So with all this talent making it arguably one of the best years in music history, who rode the crest?
What was number one for the longest in 1971?
In the moments leading up to Tapestry, Carole King wasn’t entirely sure she could do it. Suppose she had experienced a surge of the same kind of uncertainty as many of her peers at the tail-end of the ‘60s, but this time, it was about her own confidence as a performer. She’d later credit James Taylor with giving the push, but as he and many others noted then and since, it was all her in the end.
Tapestry spent 15 weeks at number one, the only album to secure the top spot for that long across the entire year. Not only this, it’s still the only album by a female artist to achieve such a feat, and to think that she almost didn’t think she had it in her, not even after a decade of writing hits for other people and countless endorsements from across the board before she’d even become a big name in her own right.
The record wasn’t just a turning point for King, either. It became a lot of musicians’ origin stories, like Amy Winehouse and Tori Amos, who became exposed to her songs and immediately learned what real storytelling in music looked and sounded like. “Her songs are like stories or sonic movies”, Amos once said, “You want to walk into them. With ‘I Feel the Earth Move’ or ‘It’s Too Late’, you’re right there”.
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