It's Too Late

Stern wrote the lyric and King the music. Released as a single in April 1971, it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and the Adult Contemporary chart, paired with I Feel the Earth Move as a double A-side. Billboard ranked the pair the number 3 record of 1971. The words describe the blameless end of a love affair. Dave Marsh saw an implicit feminism in a song where the woman leaves, and Robert Christgau wrote that if there was a truer song about breaking up, the world, or at least AM radio, was not ready for it. Pitchfork heard a grown-up girl-group anthem in which the best part of breaking up is clarity. Stern told the author Sheila Weller she wrote the words in a single day.

Danny Kortchmar played congas and electric guitar, Curtis Amy took the saxophone solo, and Joel O'Brien played drums. The recording won record of the year at the 1972 Grammys and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003. Quartz, with the singer Dina Carroll, took a dance version to number eight in Britain in 1991, and Gloria Estefan recorded it in 1995. At Hyde Park in 2016 it was sung by a crowd of 50,000.