The woman who shot to fame with "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" in 1971 (going on to win a Grammy for Best New Artist as well as scoring a hit with the song she co-wrote with Jacob Brackman) is a legend, a living one, still capable of producing amazing work, work that many of us would argue is superior than her earliest hits.
I grew up with Carly in the house, my parents were big fans of her and Joni Mitchell and Carole King and Jackson Browne and others. Carole was an easy early hit with her Really Rosie soundtrack to the children's cartoon and her songs on the Care Bears movie soundtrack. But Carly was the first person who ever made me think about writing a song.
I was probably 8 and I was in my room listening to the radio -- too loud, but never a problem in my house. I was tired and just didn't feel like moving, not even to close the comic book I'd been reading. I was on an oldies station -- because that's the music I knew from my parents -- and Carly's "You're So Vain" came on. Now I could sing on the chorus already, I'd heard the song that often before. But laying there too tired to move, with a speaker on either side of me, I really heard the song and the story in it for the first time.
And, like a good portion of the country, I wondered exactly who she wrote that song about?
Starting with Hello Big Man and Spoiled Girl, Carly begins a shift that's courageous and extraordinary. As Kat frequently notes, Carly's male peers didn't grow older. They kept writing and performing songs like they were teenagers just falling in love.
Carly added experience and maturity to her songbook and it's allowed for some of her strongest and finest work. And I can spend forever pondering moments in the lyrics of "Like A River" (about her mother's passing) or "Scar." Or I can just get lost in the beauty of "How Can You Ever Forget?" There's a richness in her work that few of her peers can match, in part because they've refused to let go of their James Dean poses.
A part of Carly's image is the album covers. Playing Possum, for example, scandalized a nation and Sears refused to carry it in their stores. This was eight years before Madonna began arriving on the scene. As an artist with tour issues -- small clubs she could handle, larger venues tended to invoke extreme stage fright -- in a time before music videos, Carly used the album cover to fashion her image with the public.
Walter Neff started a site this year, Carly Simon Album Covers. And there, he explores what the covers say to him and offers information you may not be aware of (like what album contains photos of Carly with film director Terrence Malick).
As always with Carly's art, there's much to explore. Check out Neff's site.
