While prepping my notes for the debut of our “Songs of the 1980s” program, I checked out Carly Simon’s memoir to discover what, if anything, she had to say about “Let the River Run,” the first-ever simultaneous Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe winning song (written, composed, and performed). A quick flip to the back pages of Boys in the Trees led to the disappointing discovery that the memoir ended well before Simon’s big 1989 win. But as this memoir chronicled one of the more influential voices in the musical backdrop of my adolescence--via radio and my personal copy of No Secrets.--I was curious to discover what made this particular voice tick.
She was the daughter of Richard Simon, founder of the famed Simon & Shuster book publishers. Luminaries, including the likes of Benny Goodman, Richard Rodgers, James Thurber, Oscar Hammerstein, were regular visitors to a household filled to the brim with music: her talented father endlessly performed classics on the piano, and the entire family entertained each other acapella with the latest from Broadway.But beneath this stunning façade was a depressive father who paid his third daughter little personal attention; a mother who carried on an affair in the family home with her son’s live-in tutor; a boy who sexually molested Carly, beginning when she was only seven; a painful and lifelong stutter she developed at eight. Simon might have been a daughter of privilege, but she was also a child of suffering.
However, the money came in handy when she and her sister, Lucy, began their singing career, traveling back and forth to London. Known as “The Simon Sisters,” the two put out three albums before Lucy got married and Carly was left on her own. At this point, her childhood repeated itself in a way; just as her parents surrounded themselves with the superstars of their day, so did Carly, making friends with half the music and film industry and sleeping with the other half: Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, to name a few of her more famous, albeit brief, partners.
Her relationship with James Taylor was love at first sight. Or second--they knew of each from their Martha’s Vineyard childhood summers. Or wait, third sight: When Simon saw his face on the cover of Time Magazine in March 1971, she declared to her sister Lucy, “I’m going to marry that man.” A month later, they met as adults, and married the following year. The two had much in common: both grew up wealthy. Both were singer/songwriters. And both were pained souls searching for peace, as Simon describes in the memoir:
From the beginning, James and I were linked together as strongly as we were not just because of love, and music, but because we were both troubled people trying our best to pass as normal.
Yet, for all their issues, the initial union of these two creative forces seems to have been quite lovely:
As James came toward me, the space between us got smaller and smaller, and our perpendicular lines, with the surge of a waterfall, became parallel. Our life together would go on in just this way for quite some time.
The songs Simon wrote chronicling their early years were included in the No Secrets album, which I owned as a 12 y/o. While in the midst of the memoir, I suddenly regretted the LP having slipped from my keeping during my high school years. Reading the stories behind the songs produced a craving for another encounter with the record. Before its replacement came in the mail, I began comparing it to Carole King’s Tapestry in my mind. King was the other powerful musical backdrop in my young life, and her Tapestry songs, playing in my memory, seemed far more cerebral and cleverly put together than Simon’s.
But when No Secrets arrived, when I placed it on the turntable and was again in the presence of that lovely, husky voice, everything that compelled me to inhale it while it was in my possession came rushing back. The lyrics and tunes are simple, yes, and one sometimes feels that they don’t perfectly rhyme, but they are unarguably beautiful. And with half of the memoir under my belt, some of the songs now struck me as the creation of a sensitive soul, perhaps—no, definitely—someone who has transformed deep suffering into poetry. “Embrace Me You Child” is beyond touching, written by a late 20-ish woman who admired her musical father from the distance to which he always held her.
If Simon suffered from her short-term adult relationships (which, from the memoir, it’s clear she did), she had the last word with at least one of them in “Your So Vain,” a #1 song that kept the world guessing for decades. Beatty, it seems, was at least the subject of verse two, but verses one and three are amalgams of clever phrases Simon jotted down as well as (possibly) two additional men whose identities she has never revealed. Simon was tortured with lifelong low self-esteem, but perhaps at the moment of this song’s composition, she felt strong enough to call out at least one egotistical miscreant because she was happily in love with Taylor; making her own recording of his song, “Night Owl”; celebrating their new relationship in the joyous “The Right Thing to Do” while angsting over it in the title track, “No Secrets.”
I never got around to performing the inspiring "Let the River Run" at our 1980s library program because we ran out of time, though learning to play and sing it was pure joy. But I'm certainly thankful my research led me to Boys in the Trees. It's a fabulous read, written in loving detail by a life-long diarist and poet of the first order. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play my new copy of No Secrets one more time.
From the beginning, James and I were linked together as strongly as we were not just because of love, and music, but because we were both troubled people trying our best to pass as normal.
Yet, for all their issues, the initial union of these two creative forces seems to have been quite lovely:
As James came toward me, the space between us got smaller and smaller, and our perpendicular lines, with the surge of a waterfall, became parallel. Our life together would go on in just this way for quite some time.
The songs Simon wrote chronicling their early years were included in the No Secrets album, which I owned as a 12 y/o. While in the midst of the memoir, I suddenly regretted the LP having slipped from my keeping during my high school years. Reading the stories behind the songs produced a craving for another encounter with the record. Before its replacement came in the mail, I began comparing it to Carole King’s Tapestry in my mind. King was the other powerful musical backdrop in my young life, and her Tapestry songs, playing in my memory, seemed far more cerebral and cleverly put together than Simon’s.
But when No Secrets arrived, when I placed it on the turntable and was again in the presence of that lovely, husky voice, everything that compelled me to inhale it while it was in my possession came rushing back. The lyrics and tunes are simple, yes, and one sometimes feels that they don’t perfectly rhyme, but they are unarguably beautiful. And with half of the memoir under my belt, some of the songs now struck me as the creation of a sensitive soul, perhaps—no, definitely—someone who has transformed deep suffering into poetry. “Embrace Me You Child” is beyond touching, written by a late 20-ish woman who admired her musical father from the distance to which he always held her.
If Simon suffered from her short-term adult relationships (which, from the memoir, it’s clear she did), she had the last word with at least one of them in “Your So Vain,” a #1 song that kept the world guessing for decades. Beatty, it seems, was at least the subject of verse two, but verses one and three are amalgams of clever phrases Simon jotted down as well as (possibly) two additional men whose identities she has never revealed. Simon was tortured with lifelong low self-esteem, but perhaps at the moment of this song’s composition, she felt strong enough to call out at least one egotistical miscreant because she was happily in love with Taylor; making her own recording of his song, “Night Owl”; celebrating their new relationship in the joyous “The Right Thing to Do” while angsting over it in the title track, “No Secrets.”
I never got around to performing the inspiring "Let the River Run" at our 1980s library program because we ran out of time, though learning to play and sing it was pure joy. But I'm certainly thankful my research led me to Boys in the Trees. It's a fabulous read, written in loving detail by a life-long diarist and poet of the first order. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play my new copy of No Secrets one more time.
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