There is a fitting cruelty in how Carly Simon’s comeback began: with somebody else’s divorce. In 1986, director Mike Nichols was filming Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s acid retelling of her own marriage’s collapse, with Meryl Streep playing the Ephron figure — a food writer who discovers, while pregnant with her second child, that her husband is in love with someone else. Nichols needed a song that knew what that felt like from the inside. He did not have to look far. Simon’s own marriage to James Taylor had ended in 1983, closing the most scrutinized union in singer-songwriter rock. She wrote Coming Around Again for the film, and the record she made of it — patient, bruised, quietly undefeated — climbed to No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100, ended a six-year absence from the upper charts, and quietly restarted her career.
A Commission Written from Experience
Ephron had published the novel Heartburn in 1983, fictionalizing the disintegration of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, the Watergate journalist — a marriage that had broken down while she was pregnant, in circumstances close enough to the book that Washington readers treated it as a roman à clef with the names barely filed down. Her screenplay kept the structure: love, betrayal, humiliation, and the stubborn, almost comic refusal of life to stop. The film, released on July 25, 1986, starred Streep alongside Jack Nicholson as the husband, and it needed music that could hold heartbreak and resilience in the same frame without tipping into either.
Simon was, in a sense, the only possible choice — and she knew the material at a cellular level. There was even a symmetry of worlds: Ephron was a daughter of screenwriters who had married into Washington journalism, while Simon was a daughter of Richard L. Simon, co-founder of the Simon & Schuster publishing house, raised inside New York literary aristocracy and fluent in precisely the milieu — bookish, neurotic, moneyed, verbally lethal — that the film anatomized. Her eleven-year marriage to Taylor had been conducted in public, harmonized on records, and dissolved amid his addiction and her own exhaustion; she had spent the early eighties making accomplished albums that radio increasingly ignored. The lyric she produced for Nichols is a masterpiece of understatement. The narrator catalogues small domestic perseverance — meals cooked, children raised, a household held together by routine — and keeps arriving at the title’s weary, hopeful conclusion: love comes around again, whether you are ready for it or not. It is not a song about triumph. It is a song about continuing, which is harder, and Simon sings it like a woman itemizing what survival actually costs.
The Record: A Ballad and a Nursery Rhyme
The single, released by Arista in August 1986, was produced by Russ Kunkel, Bill Payne and George Massenburg with Paul Samwell-Smith — a credits list that tells its own story about Simon’s world, since Kunkel and Payne were pillars of the Los Angeles session scene that had defined the singer-songwriter era alongside her. The production is deliberately spare: a slow, swaying keyboard-led arrangement that leaves the vocal exposed, so the song’s repetitions accumulate like weather. Nothing in it begs for a hit. That restraint is exactly why it became one. Listen to how Simon phrases the chorus — she never oversells the title line, never leans on it the way a hungrier singer would. Each return of the phrase lands a little differently: first as observation, then as resignation, finally as something close to gratitude. It is a masterclass in the confessional style she had helped invent fifteen years earlier, now stripped of youthful drama and rebuilt out of middle-aged patience. In an era of gated drums and maximal production, the record sounded almost defiant in its quietness — a woman, a piano pulse, and a conclusion she had clearly had to live her way toward.
The single’s strangest and most revealing feature sat on the B-side. Itsy Bitsy Spider — the children’s nursery song, delivered in a similar stripped-down arrangement — sounds at first like a novelty. It is anything but. Simon has pointed out the hidden wiring between the two tracks: the title song is in the key of C, the spider in G, and the nursery rhyme’s lyric is the film’s whole philosophy in miniature. The spider climbs, the rain washes it out, the sun dries the rain, and the spider climbs again. Coming around again, in other words, is not a sentiment; it is a mechanism. On the album Coming Around Again, released on April 13, 1987 — her thirteenth studio album and her first for Arista — the spider song closed the record, and in concert Simon fused the two into a medley with an extended turnaround, a performance preserved on her Greatest Hits Live album, drawn from the 1987 HBO special filmed on Martha’s Vineyard.
The video for the single made the same point visually, intercutting Simon’s performance with home movies of herself as a baby and small child in the care of her parents, Richard and Andrea Simon. The effect is disarming: the grown singer, post-divorce and mid-comeback, rhymed against the child she had been before any of it happened.
Back on the Charts
Coming Around Again entered the Billboard Hot 100 on November 1, 1986, at a humble No. 97 — and then simply refused to leave quietly. Week by week, through the whole winter, it climbed: a slow build of the kind that suggests listeners passing the record hand to hand rather than radio forcing it on them. Nearly three months after its debut it peaked at No. 18 in the chart week of January 24, 1987, becoming Simon’s twelfth Top 40 hit. There is something thematically perfect about that trajectory. A song about the patience of recovery succeeded by exactly that method — no splash, no hype, just steady accumulation until the industry had to acknowledge it was there. On the Adult Contemporary chart it reached No. 5, confirming that the audience which had grown up with her was still listening and now had divorces of its own to soundtrack. Abroad the record did even better: No. 10 in the United Kingdom, where it earned a Silver certification from the BPI, No. 3 in Sweden, No. 5 in Ireland and No. 6 in Austria. Billboard, reviewing the single, caught its mood precisely, calling it a moody sway comparable to the Thompson Twins’ Hold Me Now.
The context made the numbers sweeter. Simon had not placed a single this high since Jesse reached No. 11 in 1980; the intervening years had brought strong records and diminishing returns, the classic profile of an artist the industry has decided to remember rather than promote. The album that followed in April 1987 consolidated the recovery, re-establishing her with a new label and a new audience of adult listeners. The move to Arista mattered symbolically as well as commercially: after a decade and a half as one of the defining artists of the Warner and Elektra world, Simon was suddenly a heritage act on a new roster, and the title song functioned as her reintroduction — not a reinvention, since she had conspicuously not become anyone else, but a reminder, delivered at ballad tempo, of what she had always done better than almost anyone. Yet Simon declined to play the comeback narrative she was handed. Interviewed by the Chicago Tribune, she pushed back on the premise: she did not perceive the song’s success as a comeback at all, having never, in her own estimation, gone anywhere. It was a characteristic answer — and, given that she had been writing and recording continuously, an accurate one.
The Long Echo
History has sided partly with the narrative and partly with Simon. Whatever she called it, Coming Around Again plainly opened her second act: it restored her commercial standing just in time for the triumph that followed two years later, when her Working Girl theme Let the River Run swept the Oscar, the Golden Globe and the Grammy. The song’s own life kept renewing, too. The British girl group B*Witched covered it in 1999, and in 2025 it resurfaced in an entirely new form — a duet version sung by Simon with Alanis Morissette for the film My Mother’s Wedding, two generations of plainspoken female songwriters sharing a chorus about endurance.
The song endures because its consolation is earned rather than asserted. Pop music is full of promises that love will return; Coming Around Again is rarer — a song about the unglamorous machinery by which people actually recover, one ordinary day stacked on another, the spider going back up the spout. It has settled into the culture as a kind of secular hymn for the divorced and the starting-over, the rare breakup record that skips both revenge and despair in favor of something much harder to write convincingly: steadiness. Simon wrote it for a film about a woman whose life had been publicly dismantled, drawing on a life of her own that had undergone something similar. The result was the gentlest kind of hit: not a declaration of victory, but proof of motion. For an artist written off at forty-three, motion was everything — and it carried her, within three years, to the biggest night of her career.