Pop · Soft Rock · Singer-Songwriter
The confessional voice of seventies pop — sharp as a diary entry, smooth as satin.
The songwriter who said the quiet part out loud
Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1943 and raised in a cultured, bookish household — her father co-founded the Simon & Schuster publishing house — Carly Simon arrived in the seventies with a stammer she’d conquered, a voice like smoked honey, and a songwriter’s instinct for the unsayable. Her 1971 debut gave us “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” a top-ten hit that treated marriage not as a fairy tale but as a question mark, and announced one of pop’s most bracingly honest new voices.
Simon’s genius was for writing the thought everyone has and nobody voices. “Anticipation” turned waiting into philosophy (and later sold a great deal of ketchup); “You’re So Vain,” her 1972 number one from No Secrets, remains the most delicious mystery in pop — three verses of velvet accusation aimed at a subject she has teased but never fully named. The record’s bite came from its elegance: Simon never raised her voice, which made every line land harder.
Her marriage to James Taylor in 1972 made them the singer-songwriter era’s golden couple, and their 1974 duet “Mockingbird” — a playful remake of the Inez and Charlie Foxx hit — captured the partnership at its sunniest. The marriage ended in 1983, but the music of those years retains a rare quality: two extraordinary talents clearly delighting in each other.
Then came James Bond. “Nobody Does It Better,” her theme for 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, was the first Bond song to be titled differently from its film — and the first to earn an Oscar nomination for the franchise’s music. It proved Simon could do grandeur as well as confession. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, she remains the seventies’ great truth-teller: the voice that said what the diary wouldn’t.