On her follow-up to the comeback album
Stoney End,
Barbra Streisand tried to do for (or to)
Carole King what she had done the last time around with
Laura Nyro, to redo her material in a similar manner and essentially hijack it (while providing a big jump in songwriter royalties, of course). This was not so easy to do in the case of "Beautiful," "Where You Lead," and "You've Got a Friend," however, since, unlike the
Nyro songs, by the time
Streisand got to these tunes, they were already on
King's own chart-topping album,
Tapestry. Nevertheless,
Streisand, who after all is a much more powerful singer than
King, did them well and even eked out a Top 40 single on "Where You Lead." And the album contained other gems, such as a delicate reading of
John Lennon's "Love" (a take on his "Mother" was far less successful) and the only recording of "I Mean to Shine," written by
Donald Fagen and
Walter Becker, soon to launch
Steely Dan.
Streisand was not able to make the final transition into the pop/rock realm for the simple reason that she wasn't a writer, but she had spent a career making other people's songs her own, and she was as effective doing that here as she had been on very different material in the '60s. ~ William Ruhlmann