tapestry

Ground-breaking 1971 Carole King album, the one that established her as a singer as well as a songwriter (other artists had been performing her songs for years when she finally started recording them). Winner of four Grammy Awards: Album of the Year, Record of the Year ("It's Too Late"), Song of the Year ("You've Got A Friend"), and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. Produced by Lou Adler, originally released by Ode Records, then Epic (a division of Sony). Album cover art features a tapestry hand-stitched by Carole King.

• I Feel The Earth Move
• So Far Away
• It's Too Late
• Home Again
• Beautiful
• Way Over Yonder
• You've Got A Friend
• Where You Lead
• Will You Love Me Tomorrow?
• Smackwater Jack
• Tapestry
• (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman

Bonus tracks on the 1999 Sony CD reissue (thanks to pax_music for pointing them out):

• Out In The Cold (previously unreleased)
• Smackwater Jack (previously unreleased live version)

Lyrics to "Tapestry":
My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever-changing view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Once amid the soft silver sadness in the sky
There came a man of fortune, a drifter passing by
He wore a torn and tattered cloth around his leathered hide
And a coat of many colors, yellow-green on either side

He moved with some uncertainty, as if he didn't know
Just what he was there for, or where he ought to go
Once he reached for something golden hanging from a tree
And his hand came down empty...

Soon within my tapestry along the rutted road
He sat down on a river rock and turned into a toad
It seemed that he had fallen into someone's wicked spell
And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn't know him well

As I watched in sorrow, there suddenly appeared
A figure gray and ghostly beneath a flowing beard
In times of deepest sorrow, I've seen him dressed in black
Now my tapestry's unraveling; he's come to take me back
He's come to take me back

Words, music, keyboards, and vocals by Carole King

Tapestry is a dark work, based in part (and largely accidentally) on Neil Gaiman's Sandman. You die, and are given the opportunity by a character named Morningstar to go back and change crucial events in your life. The Fates (Clotho, Atropos, and Lachesis), of course, want you to keep things the same. The player must relive three important episodes in the character's life: his mother's death, his wife's illness, and his own death.

Tapestry is more fiction than interactive. There aren't really puzzles, so to speak, though finding the third path may be somewhat difficult. Much more important is the atmosphere: Tapestry ranks with Andrew Plotkin's Shade as one of the most atmospheric pieces of IF, ever.

An open source web application framework, written in Java.

Tapestry is available on the SourceForge.

It's based on a real component object model. The goal is to maximize functionality and minimize coding. It works.

Tap"es*try (?), n.; pl. Tapestries (#). [F. tapissere, fr. tapisser to carpet, to hang, or cover with tapestry, fr. tapis a carpet, carpeting, LL. tapecius, fr. L. tapete carpet, tapestry, Gr. , . Cf. Tapis, Tippet.]

A fabric, usually of worsted, worked upon a warp of linen or other thread by hand, the designs being usually more or less pictorial and the stuff employed for wall hangings and the like. The term is also applied to different kinds of embroidery.

Tapestry carpet, a kind of carpet, somewhat resembling Brussels, in which the warp is printed before weaving, so as to produce the figure in the cloth. -- Tapestry moth. Zool. Same as Carpet moth, under Carpet.

© Webster 1913.

Tap"es*try, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Tapestried (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Tapestrying.]

To adorn with tapestry, or as with tapestry.

The Trosachs wound, as now, between gigantic walls of rock tapestried with broom and wild roses. Macaulay.

© Webster 1913.