Carly Simon
Simon at the 1989 Academy Awards (March 1989)
Background information
Birth name	Carly Elisabeth Simon
Born	(1945-06-25) June 25, 1945 (age 67) New York City, New York, United States
Origin	Riverdale, Bronx, New York, United States
Genres	Pop, rock, pop standards
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, musician, actress, writer
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, piano
Years active	1964–present
Labels	Elektra, Warner Bros., Epic, Arista, Rhino, Columbia, Hear Music, Iris
Associated acts	James Taylor, Elephant's Memory
Website	www.carlysimon.com

Carly Elisabeth Simon (born June 25, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and children's author. She rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records, and has since been the recipient of two Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for her work. Throughout her career, she has amassed 13 Top 40 hits including "You're So Vain", "Nobody Does It Better", and "Coming Around Again".

The former wife of another notable singer-songwriter, James Taylor, she has two children, Sarah "Sally" Maria Taylor and Ben Taylor, who are also musicians.

She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994.

Early life[link]

Carly Simon was born in New York City, New York. Her father, of Jewish descent, was Richard L. Simon (co-founder of Simon & Schuster), a pianist who often played Chopin and Beethoven at home. Her mother was Andrea Louise Simon (née Heinemann),^[1] a civil rights activist and singer, of black^[2] and German descent. In a 2004 interview with fashion designer Michael Kors for the July issue of Interview Magazine, she revealed her full ancestry as Jewish, African, Cuban, and French.^[3]

Carly Simon was raised in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City^[4] and has two older sisters, Joanna (b. 1940) and Lucy (b. 1943), and a younger brother, Peter (b. 1947). They were raised as nominal Catholics, according to a book of photography Peter published in the late 1990s.^[5] She attended Riverdale Country School. She also briefly attended Sarah Lawrence College and joined Alpha Gamma Delta, before dropping out to pursue music.

Career[link]

Early career[link]

Carly Simon's career began with a short-lived music group with her sister Lucy as The Simon Sisters. They had a minor hit in 1964 called "Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod", and made three albums together before Lucy left to get married and start a family. Later, Carly collaborated with eclectic New York rockers Elephant's Memory for about six months. She also appeared in the 1971 Milos Forman movie Taking Off, playing an auditioning singer, and sang "Long Term Physical Effects", which was included in Taking Off, the 1971 soundtrack for the movie.

Going solo[link]

Her solo music career began in 1971, with the self-titled Carly Simon on Elektra Records. The album contained her breakthrough top-ten hit "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be". It was followed quickly by a second album, Anticipation. The title song from that album, written about a romance between Simon and Yusuf Islam (known then as Cat Stevens), was a significant hit, reaching #3 at Easy Listening radio and #13 on Billboard's Hot 100. The next single release - also reportedly written about Stevens, though perhaps about James Taylor, whom she had known since childhood - was "Legend In Your Own Time" which made a more modest impact on the charts, peaking at #50 on the Hot 100.^[6] After their brief liaison during 1970–1971 ended amicably, Stevens wrote his song "Sweet Scarlet" about Simon, who also had highly publicized relationships with Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Kris Kristofferson and James Taylor during this period.

Success[link]

In 1973 Simon scored the biggest success of her career with the classic global smash "You're So Vain". It hit #1 on the U.S. Pop and Adult Contemporary charts, and sold over a million copies in the United States alone. It was one of the decade's biggest hits and propelled Simon's breakthrough album No Secrets to #1 on the U.S. album charts, where it stayed for six consecutive weeks. The album achieved Gold status that year, but by the album's 25th anniversary in 1997, the album had been certified Platinum. "You're So Vain" received Grammy Award nominations for Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. Additionally, in 2008, it was listed at #72 on the Billboard Hot 100's list of the top 100 songs from the chart's first 50 years, August 1958 through July 2008.

The subject of the song itself has become one of the biggest enigmas in popular music, as this track also carries one of the most famous lyrics: "You're so vain/I bet you think this song is about you." Simon has never publicly admitted who the song is about. She hinted that it could be a composite of several people, and for many people the most likely "suspects" have always been Beatty or Jagger, who sings backup vocals on this recording. Simon has given vague hints over the decades to a variety of talk shows and publications, saying that riddles wouldn't be interesting if everyone knew the answers to them. On August 5, 2003, she did finally auction off the information to the winner of a charity function for a grand total of US$50,000, with the condition that the winner (a television executive, Dick Ebersol on NBC's Today Show) not reveal who it is.^[7]

Later in 1973, the follow-up single, "The Right Thing To Do", was another sizable hit, reaching #4 Adult Contemporary and #17 Pop. That same year Simon performed on Lee Clayton's album Lee Clayton and co-sang on the song "New York Suite 409" and on Livingston Taylor's album Over the Rainbow and sang with both Livingston and his famous brother, James Taylor (who was, by then, her husband) on the songs "Loving Be My New Horizon" and "Pretty Woman".

In 1974, Simon followed the smash No Secrets album with Hotcakes, which reached #3 on Billboard's Album Chart and was certified Gold, though it did not match the sales of No Secrets. Hotcakes included two top ten singles, "Mockingbird", a duet with James Taylor that peaked at #5 on Billboard's Pop Singles chart, and "Haven't Got Time For the Pain", which hit #2 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart.^[8] The same year, Simon provided vocals on Tom Rush's album Ladies Love Outlaws and co-sang with Rush on "No Regrets" and as backup on "Claim On Me". In 1975, Elektra released her first greatest-hits album, The Best of Carly Simon, which became Simon's all time best selling disc and eventually reached Triple-Platinum status in the United States.

Simon's record sales declined considerably with 1975's Playing Possum and 1976's Another Passenger. Playing Possum was a Top Ten album, with a Top 40 single "Attitude Dancing" and two other charting singles,^[9] but Another Passenger produced only one single, "It Keeps You Running", with the Doobie Brothers, as which barely scraped into the top 50.^[10] 1976 also saw Simon contributing backup vocals on the song "Peter" on Peter Ivers's album Peter Ivers. She also made her only appearance on Saturday Night Live. It was a pre-taped performance—a rare occurrence on that show—because Simon suffered terrible bouts of stage fright. In the appearance, she sang two songs: "Half A Chance" and her signature song, "You're So Vain".

In 1977, Simon had a surprise international hit with "Nobody Does It Better", the theme to the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. The million-selling Gold single held at #2 for several weeks, behind Debby Boone's mega-hit "You Light Up My Life" (which became the biggest hit of the entire decade). "Nobody Does It Better" remains Simon's second-biggest U.S. hit, after "You're So Vain". It was 1977's biggest Adult Contemporary hit, where it held at #1 for seven straight weeks. It also received Grammy nominations for Song Of The Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance Female.

Also in 1977, Simon co-produced Libby Titus's album Libby Titus and sang backup on two songs: "Can This Be Our Love Affair?" and "Darkness 'Til Dawn".

Simon's career took another upward swing in 1978 with the hit album Boys In The Trees. The album produced another Top 10 Pop and Adult Contemporary hit with the jazzy and sensual "You Belong To Me". Boys In The Trees was a major success, and returned Simon to Platinum album status in the U.S. It later earned Simon yet another Grammy nomination. She was featured on the front covers of People and Rolling Stone magazines that spring. Also in 1978, Simon and James Taylor sang backing vocals on two songs for Taylor's sister Kate's album Kate Taylor: "Happy Birthday Sweet Darling" and "Jason & Ida". Simon and Taylor also sang backup on three songs on John Hall's debut solo album John Hall, "The Fault", "Good Enough" and "Voyagers". Simon and Taylor would also sing backup on one song, "Power", from Hall's next album, which is also titled Power (1979).

On November 2, 1978, Simon guested on the song "I Live In The Woods" at a live, four-hour concert by Burt Bacharach and the Houston Symphony Orchestra at Jones Hall in Houston, Texas. All the songs at that concert became Bacharach's album Woman, which was released in 1979. That year, shortly after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, from September 19 to September 22, a series of concerts were held at New York City's Madison Square Garden and sponsored by Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), a group of musicians against nuclear power, co-founded by John Hall. Always politically active, Simon and James Taylor were part of the concerts which later became a documentary and concert film, No Nukes (1980) as well as a live album of the same name (1979).

Simon released her last album for Elektra, Spy, in 1979. It sold poorly, although a harder-edged single from the album, "Vengeance", was a modest hit and received airplay on U.S. album rock stations. "Vengeance" earned Simon a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance Female in early 1980 - the first year to feature the new category.

From 1972 to 1979, Simon sang backup vocals on the following James Taylor songs and albums (not counting compilations): "One Man Parade" from 1972's One Man Dog, "Rock 'n' Roll Is Music Now", "Let It All Fall Down", "Me And My Guitar", "Daddy's Baby" and "Ain't No Song" from 1974's Walking Man, "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" from 1975's Gorilla, "Shower the People", "A Junkie's Lament", "Slow Burning Love" and "Family Man" from 1976's In the Pocket, and "B.S.U.R." from 1979's Flag. She also co-wrote with Taylor the song "Terra Nova" on his 1977 album JT.

1980s[link]

In 1980, Simon signed with Elektra's sibling label Warner Bros. Records. During a show in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while she toured to promote her album, Come Upstairs, Simon collapsed onstage of exhaustion. She subsequently performed considerably less throughout the 1980s. Simon scored another million-selling U.S. Gold single with the hit, "Jesse", from that album. Simon also contributed the song "Be With Me" to the 1980 album In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record, which was produced by her sister Lucy and Lucy's husband, David Levine. Simon can also be heard on the song "In Harmony", along with other members of the Simon/Taylor families. Carly and Lucy contributed a "Simon Sisters" song — which was called "Maryanne" — to the 1982 follow-up album In Harmony 2, which was also produced by Lucy and her husband. Both albums won Grammy Awards for Best Album for Children.

Torch (1981) was an album of melancholy jazz standards, but suffered from disappointing sales. The Nile Rodgers & Bernard Edwards produced single "Why", from the soundtrack to the 1982 film Soup For One, was a top-ten hit single in the U.K. but stalled at #74 in the U.S. She had another minor U.K. success with the single "Kissing With Confidence", a song off the 1983 album Dancing For Mental Health by Will Powers (a pseudonym for photographer Lynn Goldsmith). Simon was the uncredited singer of the song co-written and mixed by Todd Rundgren. Simon's singles were generally less successful in the 1980s, although most of them did quite well on Adult Contemporary radio formats. In 1983, she made her last album for Warner, Hello Big Man, but this also suffered from disappointing sales. That same year, Simon performed on two albums, The Perfect Stranger by Jesse Colin Young (singing on the track "Fight For It" with Young) and Wonderland by Nils Lofgren (singing on the track "Lonesome Ranger" with Lofgren). By this time, her contract with Warner Bros. had ended. In 1985, she signed with Epic Records and made one album for them, Spoiled Girl. This too was commercially unsuccessful and her contract with Epic was cancelled.

In 1986, Simon signed with Arista Records and soon rebounded from her career slump. Her first album for Arista, Coming Around Again (1987), gave Simon another international hit with the title track (which was featured in the film Heartburn), returning her to the Billboard Pop Top 20 and the U.K. Top 10 (It also garnered her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance). The album also featured the Top 10 Adult Contemporary hits "Give Me All Night", "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of", "All I Want Is You" and a cover of "As Time Goes By" (featuring Stevie Wonder on harmonica). The album itself was her first Gold release in nine years, and went Platinum in 1988. These and older songs were featured in a picturesque HBO concert special which was filmed at Martha's Vineyard, where Simon and her band performed live on a pier. Most of these songs were compiled for her 1988 album, Greatest Hits Live. The album continued her mounting comeback, quickly going Gold, and was later certified Platinum by the RIAA in 1996. From Live a recording of Simon's evergreen "You're So Vain" was released as a single in the UK.

Throughout the 1980s, Simon successfully contributed to several film and television scores, including the songs:

• "Why" for the film Soup For One (1982)
• "Something More" for the film Love Child (1982)
• "Someone Waits for You" for the film Swing Shift (1984)
• "All the Love in the World" for the film Torchlight (1985)
• "It's Hard To Be Tender" for the television miniseries Sins (1986)
• "If It Wasn't Love" for the film Nothing In Common (1986)
• "Two Looking at One" for the film The Karate Kid, Part II (1986)
• "Coming Around Again"/"Itsy Bitsy Spider" for the film Heartburn (1986)
• "Let the River Run" for the film Working Girl (1988) (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Song (1988); the Golden Globe Award for Best Song (1988); and the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media (1990))

She is the first artist to win all three awards (Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy) for a song that is composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist (the only other such artist being Bruce Springsteen for his "Streets of Philadelphia" 1993: Oscar, 1994: Golden Globe & two Grammys).

The Working Girl soundtrack album came out in early 1989, and featured more music from Simon, and as a tribute to Christa McAuliffe, who was slated to be the first teacher in space and who died in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster for whom Simon also wrote a song "You're Where I Go". McAuliffe was a Simon fan and had taken a cassette of her music on board the shuttle.

In 1987, Simon also sang the theme for the 1988 Democratic National Convention, "The Turn of The Tide", for a Marlo Thomas television special Free to Be...A Family. The song was later included on the 1988 soundtrack album of the same name on A&M Records.

1990s[link]

In 1990, Simon released two albums: her second standards album, My Romance, and an album of original material Have You Seen Me Lately. The latter featured a major (#4) Adult Contemporary chart hit with "Better Not Tell Her" - Simon's biggest hit of the 1990s. Her second children's book, "The Boy of the Bells" was also published in 1990 and she wrote the score for the 1990 film Postcards from the Edge. In 1991, Simon wrote her third children's book, "The Fisherman's Song", which was based on the song of the same name from her 1990 album Have You Seen Me Lately. The same year, she performed a duet with Plácido Domingo on the song "The Last Night Of The World" (from the Miss Saigon musical) on Domingo's album The Broadway I Love. A year later, Simon wrote the music for the Nora Ephron film This Is My Life, which included the song "Love Of My Life". In 1993, she contributed the song "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" for the film Sleepless In Seattle and recorded the same song in combo with "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" with Frank Sinatra for his album Duets.

1993 also saw Simon recording a contemporary opera called Romulus Hunt (having been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Association and the Kennedy Center). She also published her fourth children's book, The Nighttime Chauffeur. She also contributed to Andreas Vollenweider's album Eolian Minstrel. Simon co-wrote the song "Private Fires" with Vollenweider and was featured vocalist on the song.

In 1994, she covered the song "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" for Ken Burns' film Baseball, as well as a recording of "I've Got a Crush On You" for Larry Adler's covers album The Glory of Gershwin. That same year, Simon recorded another album of original songs, Letters Never Sent, and contributed a Christmas song, "The Night Before Christmas", to the soundtrack for the film Mixed Nuts. In April 1995, Simon surprised thousands of commuters at New York's Grand Central Terminal with an unannounced performance which was filmed for a Lifetime Television Special. It was also released on home video in December of that year. Also in 1995, she put aside years of stage fright long enough to perform on an American concert tour in conjunction with Hall & Oates. On August 30, 1995, she also made a rare joint appearance with her ex-husband, James Taylor, for a concert on Martha's Vineyard. Dubbed "Livestock '95", it was a benefit for the Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Society, with over 10,000 people in attendance. She performed a duet with Mindy Jostyn on the song "Time, Be On My Side", featured on Jostyn's 1995 album Five Miles From Hope about her recent battle with colon cancer. Ten years later, Jostyn would pass away from the disease at the age of 43. 1995 also saw the release of Clouds In My Coffee, a boxed set of highlights from her 30 year career from 1965 to 1995.

Simon continued to write and record music for films and wrote the theme songs to several more movies including "Two Little Sisters" from the 1996 movie Marvin's Room and "In Two Straight Lines" from the 1998 movie Madeline. 1997 saw the release of Simon's third standards album, Film Noir, which was recorded in collaboration with Jimmy Webb and for which she was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Vocal Performance. She also released her fifth children's book, "Midnight Farm". Simon was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997, and underwent surgery that year and again in 1998. In 1999 The Very Best Of Carly Simon: Nobody Does It Better, a UK-only greatest hits album, was released. Also that year, Simon worked again with the Swiss musician Andreas Vollenweider, and was the featured vocalist for the song "Your Silver Key" on Vollenweider's album Cosmopoly.

During the 1990s, the American press reported an incident between Simon and the Pretenders' vocalist Chrissie Hynde, at a Joni Mitchell concert at New York's Fez Club. Some reports stated that a drunk and disorderly Hynde grabbed Simon around the neck and punched her, although Simon attempted to put these rumors to rest on her official website in 2002. Numerous witnesses, however, claim that Simon was, indeed, assaulted by Hynde.^[11]

2000s[link]

In 2000, Simon released a new album, The Bedroom Tapes. Largely written and recorded at home in her bedroom (hence the title) while she was recuperating from her health problems of the previous couple of years, it was her first album of original songs in almost six years. Despite this, the album did not sell well, though one of the album's tracks, "Our Affair", was remixed and featured in the Gwyneth Paltrow/Ben Affleck film "Bounce". In 2001, Simon performed on "Son of a Gun (I Betcha Think This Song Is About You)" with Janet Jackson on Jackson's album All for You. She also contributed back-up vocals on two songs, "Don't Turn Away" and "East Of Eden", for Mindy Jostyn's 2001 album Blue Stories. In November 2001, Simon's Oscar-winning song "Let the River Run" was used in a public service ad for the United States Postal Service. Entitled "Pride", it was produced to boost public confidence and postal worker morale in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the 2001 Anthrax attacks.