When this old world starts getting me down, a sure way to cheer me up is to play a Gerry Goffin lyric.  Songs like “I’m Into Something Good,” “Some Kind of Wonderful” and “The Loco-Motion” all are filled with youthful optimism and unfettered joy, qualities that Goffin could lyrically impart with abundant heart and craftsmanship.  These songs can raise the spirits (and the pulse!) in the way that only the most transcendent music can.  Goffin passed away today at the age of 75, but lived long enough to see his songbook – one that ranks among the finest in American popular music – justly celebrated in every conceivable medium including the Broadway stage.  The Tony Award-winning Beautiful is subtitled The Carole King Musical after Goffin’s first wife and most frequent songwriting partner, but it might as well bear the name The Goffin and King Musical.

Gerry Goffin was inspired by the Broadway greats of yesteryear, including Richard Rodgers’ first partner Lorenz Hart, when he set out with his young wife Carole King to write songs and in the process shaped the sound of pop music.  Forget those revisionists who claim that the terrain of popular song was a wasteland between the birth of rock-and-roll and the coming of The Beatles.  Between 1960 and 1963, Goffin and King turned out such songs as “Chains,” “Go Away, Little Girl,” “It Might as Well Rain ‘Til September,” “Hey Girl,” “One Fine Day,” “Take Good Care of My Baby,” and a pair of breathtaking standards: “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “Up on the Roof.”  The former, the duo’s breakthrough and first chart-topper, showed startlingly unusual sensitivity.  Goffin wrote from the perspective of a teenage girl worried that her boyfriend won’t love her once she gives up the near and dear prize she’s been withholding.  It was a situation many young girls had doubtless experienced, given voice with eloquence, vulnerability, honesty and universality.  Though barely out of his own teen years, Goffin’s understanding of the human condition was already apparent.  His ever-developing maturity was never more apparent than in his lyric to “Up on the Roof,” a sophisticated yet dreamy ballad that stunningly romanticized the urban landscape.  Who hadn’t wished for a place for their cares to drift right into space?  Gerry Goffin’s lyrics transcended age, gender and status.

Goffin found beauty and poetry in anguish. Think of the sublimely artful despair of “Hey, Girl,” “No Easy Way Down,” “Just Once in My Life,” “I Can’t Make It Alone,” “The Right to Cry” and scores of others songs that were as much soul as pop.  When The British Invasion hit American shores and The Brill Building scene began to wane, Goffin adapted, reinventing his lyrical style and taking inspiration from Bob Dylan and beyond.  “Porpoise Song” was trippy psychedelia and “Pleasant Valley Sunday” was a scathing indictment of suburbia.  The evocative, haunting imagery of “Snow Queen” was light years removed from “Take Good Care of My Baby” but just as exhilarating.  The marriage of lyricist and composer between Goffin and King was a perfect one, even if their real-life marriage wasn’t.

Yet even as he battled personal demons in the later days of their union, Goffin was able to pen an anthem like “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman,” so memorably delivered first by Aretha Franklin and later by Carole King herself on Tapestry.  That epochal singer-songwriter album, incidentally, featured three songs with lyrics by Gerry Goffin including the atypically humorous “Smackwater Jack.”  Goffin reinvented himself yet again in partnership with writers like Barry Goldberg (“I’ve Got to Use My Imagination”) and Michael Masser (“Saving All My Love for You,” “Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To),” “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You”).  In 1995, Goffin released the solo LP Back Room Blood in which he co-wrote a pair of songs with none other than Bob Dylan.  What greater testament is there to Goffin’s artistic rebirth than to note that Dylan also served as sideman and co-producer?

As one of his lyrics goes, Gerry Goffin “wasn’t born to follow;” he carved his own path.  It goes without saying that his timeless and vibrant songs – including roughly sixty Top 40 hits – will live on, discovered by each subsequent generation.  No doubt the local rock group down the street is trying hard to learn a Gerry Goffin song.  I’d like to think Mr. Goffin is smiling down.