I like every single Carly Simon song I've ever heard

That's one of the great unheralded rock album covers, I think. It's obviously trying to be "sexy" but so filled with accidental and contingent detail (cooing mouth, clenched fists, painfully self-conscious pose, worn boot, sliced head, revealed ass, visible edge of slightly curled backdrop) it's ultimately as cryptic as it is sexy.

http://www.bluebeat.com/i/a/l/l5034.jpg

Well put. Always been intrigued by that cover...and not simply because of the sexiness.

Yeah that's the one! That song's on that one isn't it?

http://s63.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=03KN23ZWEJ1FR1BV3L7X614NTA

"Coming Around Again" was the theme to Heartburn -- Nora Ephron's movie based on her fictionalized book about her marriage to Carl Bernstein. Both are guilty pleasures.

Also, the lyrics of "Nobody Does It Better" were written by Carole Bayer Sager...

Me need the 7 minute version of 'Why' bad. I only found out it was produced by Chic the other week.

and I only found out that she was the lead singer on "Kissing with Confidence" about ooh.....

no REALLY? what did they do to her voice to make it sound like that?
i thought that was just a story and not true!

i'm amazed the long version of WHY isn't on the SOUP FOR ONE soundtrack from whence it came. it'll be all over $0u!$££k mind.

Oh I love people who love Carly. Oh yes I do. I love you guys. Holy hell.

I'm going to pull out that greatest hits now.
But I do have Hotcakes on vinyl, VIRGIN VINYL
I wrote about it here before.

But the Anticipation album is to die for. Oh yeah it is.

Bimble's on an alcoholic binge again.

Got to sober up if I could stop crying.
If I could just stop crying. If I could only stop.
I think I'm going to put on Rush soon.

LEGEND IN YOUR OWN TIME

That song is the shit, man. That is absolutely the way to go.

Carly man, oh god. What I wouldn't do for Carly.

I don't have the need for the pain.

I dig me some carly, but i don't she was/is as talented as Judee or Joni.

I like-not-love "Why" -- her voice sounds like an off-key synthesizer (no, not a good thing, kids).

"You Belong To Me," however, is genius.

The late-80s stuff, not so good.

Life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon...
And a horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight.

Me need the 7 minute version of 'Why' bad. I only found out it was produced by Chic the other week.

pretty much available on every Balearic comp...EVER!...love the slowed-down drum machine, never knew Nile Rodgers was involved..."la-dee-dah" vocals predate Crystal Waters by almost a decade...

"You're So Vain" still her pinnacle..."you walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht", what an opening line...

I can send "Why" to whomever wants it.

I like-not-love "Why" -- her voice sounds like an off-key synthesizer (no, not a good thing, kids).

why

does this post
hurt so much?

tell me why

Jack Nitzsche's "Carly" in which the producer slavers over her and writes a song about the experience. "That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be" sounded like the kind of suburban angst I always wanted enough money to enjoy. she is pregnant and m-tee cute on cover of No Secrets which has some good stuff on it.

not No Secrets but Hotcakes--aka Pigs in a Blanket.

sometimes i think my dad only bought carly records for the covers. i don't remember him playing them that much.

man, last summer jimmy webb was recording with carly on the island and i totally wanted to sneak into the studio and have him sign my copy of wichita lineman.

i see carly all the time here. and her little dog too. her son is dreamy. so is her daughter. dreamy family all around.

sally taylor will knit you a poncho, you know. if you ask her.

http://www.sallytaylor.com/photos/poncho5.jpg

http://www.sallytaylor.com/Poncho.shtml

and I only found out that she was the lead singer on "Kissing with Confidence" about ooh.....

-- Mark G, Tuesday, 26 February 2008 16:59 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

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no REALLY? what did they do to her voice to make it sound like that?
i thought that was just a story and not true!

i'm amazed the long version of WHY isn't on the SOUP FOR ONE soundtrack from whence it came. it'll be all over $0u!$££k mind.

-- pisces, Tuesday, 26 February 2008 17:19 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

No, not the deep voice talky bit, the singing bit. Hear it again, and you will go "Oh, of course it's her! It sounds exactly like her!"

during the evening in which I played Kay Huntington's LP (see thread on late-'60s female singers who haven't gotten hipster kisses) to friends who became very disturbed that I had the record, let alone giggled and laughed as I played it for them, I also played some Carly Simon. I find Carly Simon soothing yet sexual in any circumstance and told them so, but no, they wanted to hear Matmos or some singer like that, not Carly, and it hurt my feelings.

I do love this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW0vzGNTir4 - the cafe scenes are priceless.

She ain't sexy in that video.

She popped up right at the end of some kids film, singing the title song whilst being in a field, sitting on a fence, etc.

Darned if I remember anything about the film tho.

Coming Around Again is amazing.

Baby sneezes
Mummy pleases
Daddy breezes in
So good on paper
So romantic
But so bewildering

I know nothing stays the same
But if you're willing to play the game
It's coming around again
So don't mind if I fall apart
There's more room in a broken heart

You pay the grocer
Fix the toaster
Kiss the host Good-bye
Then you break a window
Burn the Souffle
Scream the lullaby

I know nothing stays the same
But if you're willing to play the game
It's coming around again
So don't mind if I fall apart
There's more room in a broken heart

And I believe in love
But what else can I do
I'm so in love with you

I know nothing stays the same
But if you're willing to play the game
It's coming around again

is that a real poncho, or is that a Sears poncho?

Insides recorded a wonderful song called "Carly Simon" for their Euphoria LP, but it doesn't seem to be about her...

In my mind, Carly Simon is inexocrably linked with Rosie Vela, as Coming Around Again debuted on the chart the same week as Vela's Magic Smile in early 1987.

She really did have a great voice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqxN_7B4Gao

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-q1x55jbbc

It's really hard to listen to this stuff, but not because I don't like it.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned this song on this thread already.

I think do too. All three of them.

I'm disappointed that her songs aren't as incisive as her voice can be; her ballads are awfully flat. But I still love "Jesse" and "You Belong To Me," the latter being the peak of seventies studio/yacht rock.

Seven minute WHY 12" = Best song ever?

hello

does anyone know where i can find the mp3 for the carly song if it wasn't love from the movie nothing in common

thanks

michael

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XpuHRhF66A&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHx8Q2HNpKQ&NR=1

this is a good one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD5K5XqaJME&feature=related

Seven minute WHY 12" = Best song ever?

― piscesx, Thursday, January 1, 2009 8:55 PM (2 years ago)

Seven minute WHY 12" = Best song ever?

― piscesx, Thursday, January 1, 2009 8:55 PM (2 years ago)

― The Brainwasher, Wednesday, June 22, 2011 7:40 AM (2 months ago)

I heard "You're So Vain" in K-Mart today and it reminded me of the fairly pointless critique the poet Jonathan Williams did of the lyrics (I think it was some sort of 70s "people tell me that pop lyrics are today's poetry, so I will now make a travesty of some pop lyrics"), and I have to admit I was amused at vaguely remembering something like: how many eyes does this person have?

But who wants to read Jonathan Williams's boring, often quasi-concretist poetry anyway? I'd much rather listen to at least a handful of Carly Simon songs.

(Worthy of more acclaim as a publisher though.)

Naturally the Carly Simon thread is hilarious and awesome.

Just hearing "why" for the first time via this Daft punk spotify playlist, really nice. Is this song about James Taylor?

I got to work with her in my studio-rat days and she was a sweet lady. Didn't know until then she was of the Simon & Schuster (sp?) Simons.

"Why" is nice but I don't think Simon's voice and Rodgers-Edwards were a snug fit.

Mick Jagger is great on 'You're So Vain'

Just breaking- second verse is about Warren Beatty.

Anti-climactic, but a good story nonetheless (that I plan to walk my class through sometime this week). "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you"--that's a tautology, right?

Think so but perhaps there is a rhetorical term that more closely captures what is going on.

That's what I was thinking, that there might be some other name for that. It's not at all a paradox, but tautology doesn't quite seem right either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKaaF757mIw

i like her song with chic

song is catchy, but this video (or more to the point, carly's moves within it) is embarrassing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW8UnXzP3ms

also, she seems such an unlikely sex symbol to me, but that was the 1970s i guess (or in this case, the early 1980s)

"You Belong to Me" and "Jesse" are better songs, but I'm resigned to muttering these opinions to my fellow supermarket shoppers as we hum along in the cereal aisle.

How do we feel about when Carly tackles the standards?

I have a love/hate thing with her version of "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" (Cole Porter), which a certain NYC radio host uses as his sign-off song every week. On first listen it sounded awkward to me, both the singing and the cheesy production, but with constant repetition it's become somewhat endearing

My favourite Carly Simon revelation is the one about her liking to be spanked before she goes onstage.

Wow, had never seen the video for Why before. I guess my main question with that is... why?!

I don't think the question about rhetorical device in "Vain" should go unanswered, hivemind to thread plz

I don't think it's a tautology, that would be more like "You're so vain because you're so vain" or "according to this song you're vain ergo you're vain"

Phrased as a paradox would be more like "You're so vain you can't imagine this song is about you"

So I dunno, I guess "absurd" or "nonsensical" would be a better term, the key weird phrase is "you probably think this song is about you", where usually the "you probably think..." construction would point to something false, here, surprisingly, it points to a truth, implied by the initial "you" and following "don't you?", adding up to a nice caricature of a person so vain that he sees himself even in such a negative description

So anyway, I think it's a play on apostrophe as a figure of speech - the vanity of the addressed person gives it a nice absurd twist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe_%28figure_of_speech%29

but sorry if these thoughts are jumbled

Thanks for trying to think through that...If the target of the song is correct, he's a) perceptive, and b) either more or less or exactly as vain as she thinks--I think that could go either way. If he's wrong, if the song's not about him, he's a) not very perceptive because b) he's even vainer than she thinks.

It's such a great line--I think it almost confounds categories.

When I played the song for my class today, with the lyrics and the backstory, they pretty quickly picked up on the fact that Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, and Taylor Swift write songs like this all the time. I told them that they all took their cue from Carly Simon, but I'm sure there are many precedents before that (Dylan wrote a bunch of who's-he-writing-about? songs in the mid-'60s). What makes "You're So Vain" so significant is that it hit #1 and turned into a national guessing game.

the line seems like a 'catch-22' to me, although i know that's not a classical figure of speech. the person to whom the song is addressed is damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.

and yeah that video for 'why' is... alternately horrifying and charming.

I thought about this some more on the way home today--I feel like it's a very important issue in 2015--and came to a similar conclusion. It's a trap, where three out of the four possibilities reflect badly on the intended target.

1) You think it's about you and you're right.
2) You think it's about you and you're wrong.
3) You don't think it's about you and you're right.
4) You don't think it's about you and you're wrong.

1 and 2 aren't good. Either way, you're definitely vain; the second possibility makes you really vain and also clueless. 4 means you're not vain but are clueless. Only 3 is a favorable outcome.

Actually, if you're the intended target, only 1 and 4 apply. Change that to three out of the four possibilities reflect badly on everyone who's ever heard the song. Most of us--me for sure--are safe with 3. For Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger and such, much trickier.

great stuff

you reckon there's more than one you in play? since it's the same word, I'd assume it refers to same subject throughout ("you walked..." "you're so vain" "don't you?") and the song can only be about you

leaving the question: who are you? two possible answers:

1) you're warren beatty or someone else intimately familiar with carly simon - this song may be about you, and you probably think it is

2) you don't know carly simon personally, so this song isn't specifically about you - but the meaning of the song might apply to you too; if you think it does, it does

I feel like it's a very important issue in 2015

carly simon and her publisher sure hope so!

I've always wondered if "You're So Vain" isn't about any man in particular—even if there are references to specific guys (i.e. Beatty)—but all men.

Keeps you Running slays
https://open.spotify.com/track/4kmIcVKU595QzqULEp1OzH?si=4UbyrPlaQ1yn_wt7pdv_lA
I’m tapped in 1977 and I can’t get out

it kinda does! is it a good album?

Personally I had diminishing returns from the rest of the album, ymmv