Premiere: Louise Goffin and Friends

Turn To Gold runs in the family

Brooklyn-born Louise Goffin grew up in LA’s Laurel Canyon during an exciting time in music history. As a child, she was immersed in the halcyon days of the explosion of singer-songwriters into pop culture. Louise, daughter of hit-writing duo Carole King and Gerry Goffin, carries on the family tradition as a songwriter, musician and Grammy nominee. On her new album, All These Hellos, she duets with friends, including Rufus Wainwright (“Chinatown”), Chris Difford (“Paris, France”) and here, with Billy Harvey on “Turn To Gold.”

Louise Goffin started her own label, Majority of One, around a decade ago and released four albums, including Appleonfire, a tribute to her father, who passed away in 2014. The disc features three songs co-written by her dad, one song she co-wrote with him, and two of her own originals. Again in the family tradition, Goffin also produced her mother’s 2011 Grammy-nominated A Holiday Carole CD, which she described as “fun,” a key component in her work. “Turn To Gold” is no exception. Louise released six singles over the course of the last year, leading up to an album titled All These Hellos, and she told Elmore how the song “Turn To Gold” came about:

“The day we were writing together, Billy [Harvey] had just received the phrase of the week from the songwriting game that he had with Bob Schneider. To stay in the game, you’d have to write a song incorporating a phrase sent by email once a week, and turn in it on time. I’d jumped in on writing to the game phrase a couple of times before, and he asked if I wanted to work on it with him that day. The phrase was ‘take a shot.’ When I sat at the piano these spooky chords came out of nowhere like they were handed to me, and Billy started singing ‘on the other side’ and riffing lines like ‘walk on water,’ ‘chase the laughter,’ etc. I thought for sure the title would’ve been ‘take a shot’ but the chorus led us elsewhere. We demoed it right after we wrote it, put a mic to the piano, took turns singing vocals. He put a towel over a drum and we did drum overdubs like that. It’s the only song on All These Hellos where the musicians later played over the original demo. What Dave Way and the musicians added brought a whole other level of slinky moodiness to it.

“The video was from last spring when we took over my friends historic log cabin one day to play some songs live on Facebook. We thought it’d be fun to lip sync to the ‘Turn To Gold,’ which we had playing on a phone, and the video was cut together from these spontaneous takes.”