As fans know, many of the biggest hits from Carole King‘s iconic 1971 album Tapestry are about romantic love: “I Feel the Earth Move,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “It’s Too Late.” Another beloved track from Tapestry, however, concerns itself with another kind of love entirely.
As King wrote in her 2012 book, A Natural Woman: A Memoir, the song “Beautiful” was inspired by a sort of personal epiphany she had during a NYC subway ride. In Chapter 7, titled “Lessons from Underground,” King shared the wisdom she learned from riding the subway.
In addition to finding the mass transit system “the most efficient and affordable method of getting around” and discovering that “the only way to catch an express is to leave early enough to make the entire trip on a local,” King came to an important realization about self-acceptance while observing the “frustration” on the faces of “passers-by.”
“I’m not exactly sure when I figured out that the way I perceived others on a given day was a reflection of how I was feeling,” King wrote. “I do know that rather than revealing itself in something like an Aha! moment, the realization was subtle. It came to me gradually, like… Ohhhh… right.”
The lyrics to “Beautiful” serve as sage advice for keeping a positive attitude:
You got to get up every morning with a smile on your face
And show the world all the love in your heart
Then people gonna treat you better
You’re gonna find, yes, you will
That you’re beautiful as you feel
According to King, “Beautiful” came to her in a spontaneous, serendipitous fashion. As such, she didn’t notice that the chorus was something of an anomaly.
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“Rather than it being a conscious thought about which I intentionally sat down to write, [the song] emerged on its own,” King wrote. “And because ‘Beautiful’ is one of those songs that came through me, I was unaware of a professional detail about the song until a fellow songwriter pointed it out: there are no rhymes in the chorus — unless you count stretching ‘will’ into ‘weel’ as a false rhyme for ‘feel.'”
The “false rhyme” certainly wasn’t a problem for fans. And decades after she penned “Beautiful,” King still believed in the power of the song’s message.
“It’s been years since I rode a BMT train, and subway tokens have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, but I still believe Subway Lesson 3 to be as true as it was the day I learned it,” she wrote. “I still believe that everyone is beautiful in some way, and by seeing the beauty in others we make ourselves more beautiful.”
While “Beautiful” was never released as a single, it went on to become one of King’s most popular songs, even inspiring the title of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, which premiered on Broadway in 2014.
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