First, an aside. My god, this woman has a large mouth! Christopher Nolan should look her way if he needs to recast The Joker in the next Batman film.
Carly Simon is one of those artists who make me wonder about the fleeting nature of talent. She put out a series of albums in the early 70s that include some of the finest songs ever written. Her No Secrets is a flawless piece of work, featuring such classics as ‘The Carter Family,’ ‘You’re So Vain’ and ‘The Right Thing to Do.’ That was in 1972.
Since then, she has put out 25 more albums (including collections of covers). And with the exception of Coming Around Again (a very strong album that contained, among other things, a version of ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ that my dad just loves) there isn’t a winner among them. And even Coming Around Again was 21 years and 13 albums ago.
So what gives? How can this woman write such wonderful and enduring songs but only during three years of a 28-year career? Does her muse only visit sporadically? Did she somehow have only 20 good songs in her? Shouldn’t somebody capable of writing ‘That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be’ be capable of churning out classic after classic for a lifetime? What do you think?
As for this song, it’s got to be one of the most depressing relationship tunes ever written. But also one of the most beautiful.
His cigarette glows in the dark.
The living room is still;
I walk by, no remark.
I tiptoe past the master bedroom where
My mother reads her magazines.
I hear her call sweet dreams,
But I forgot how to dream.
But you say it’s time we moved in together
And raised a family of our own, you and me –
Well, that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be:
You want to marry me, we’ll marry.
My friends from college they’re all married now;
They have their houses and their lawns.
They have their silent noons,
Tearful nights, angry dawns.
Their children hate them for the things they’re not;
They hate themselves for what they are-
And yet they drink, they laugh,
Close the wound, hide the scar.
But you say it’s time we moved in together
And raised a family of our own, you and me –
Well, that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be:
You want to marry me, we’ll marry.
You say we can keep our love alive
Babe – all I know is what I see –
The couples cling and claw
And drown in love’s debris.
You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds,
But soon you’ll cage me on your shelf –
I’ll never learn to be just me first
By myself.
Well O.K., it’s time we moved in together
And raised a family of our own, you and me –
Well, that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be,
You want to marry me, we’ll marry,
We’ll marry.
Meet Me In Montauk 
Well – my first question is – how do you know? How many of the songs on the other 25 albums have you actually heard? Yes, they have received less critical or commercial attention, but does that automatically mean they aren’t good? I, for one, can’t name a single song from an album of hers I don’t own. So… I’m not sure I can buy your premise as it relates to this particular artist. She’s churning out album after album, and I doubt all of the songs on those albums are bad. And – would you even know this wonderful, sublime song had our parents not played it on a reel to reel player all those many years ago? It’s not as those this Carly gem is burning up the airwaves. So I say get thee to a record store and buy some of the other great Carly Simon albums that are just waiting to be discovered.
Still, I do think it’s possible that any artist is capable of striking artistic gold only sporadically – whether over a fruitful period of years or off and on again over many years. Isn’t that human nature? Isn’t it always more shocking when anyone is consistently wonderful each time at bat? (Trying to see how many metaphors I can mix into one paragraph 😉
As she is one of the more enduring artists in your collection, it makes sense that you would pose this question regarding her rather than the Tift or Fiona or Rufus. They haven’t been around long enough to have created albums you haven’t bought.
Not a winner among her 25 albums since No Secrets?
HUH?
I have every single one of those albums and No Secrets is far from my favorite.
Sales do not equate winning albums.
20 good songs?
oh boy—are you one those music lovers that think being on the charts is equivalent to a song being good?
Check out her less ‘popular’ albums–take note of the fact that song after song on each album is good–well thought out and contstructed…no filler on Carly albums.
And don’t forget she was covering the standards when Rod Stewart was still in hot pants.
🙂
I gotta agree with Amy and WIlly here. Unless you have heard the other albums, I don’t think you can make a judgment as to her post No Secrets production. Oh, and Let the River Run was a damn good song:)
I just love Carly Simon and this is one of my favorite songs. Thanks for including this wonderful artist on your blog. She is consistently great and has a terrible time with stage fright but has overcome this (thank god!). She does a wonderful job on the standards in “My Romance” and her “Film Noir” CD even has a duet with John Travolta!
I wish I had the financial resources to buy up all those albums and do a scientific analysis. But instead I’m relying on the critical consensus (not sales, Willie). And the fact that she put out a Greatest Hits album in 1991 that consisted entirely of material she recorded in the early 70s!
She later released a 2-disc compilation that consisted of one disc of 70s material and one disc of material from the rest of her career, and the AllMusic Guide (great resource, by the way) suggests that you ditch the second disc with its inferior material and stick with the good stuff.
But my point is that if you look at artists like Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams… these are people who got their start in the 70s but are still putting out relevant, critically acclaimed work to this day.
And you can say those are exceptional artists and not the norm. But I would argue that Carly Simon’s best work suggests she is just as exceptional a songwriter as that group.
Also, the fact that she releases so many covers albums is interesting. She certainly has a great voice, but I’m more interested in her songwriting skills.
It may will be the case that Carly Simon is simply not as prolific as other great songwriters, whether by choice or talent level. Carol King’s Tapestry stands out as one of the greatest songwriting achievements of all time, but she did not stay on the radar into the 80’s or beyond. Other examples of great songwriters who have not had great longevity include Cat Stevens, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell. Some have moved away from music, or have become so experimental that they don’t connect in the same way. SOme have just become insane terrorist Muslims:)
It is the rare artist who can put out great music decade after decade. I agree that Costello fits that category –Dylan has ebbed and flowed, however, as have Springsteen and Paul Simon. And Lucinda Williams has barely made music in one decade let alone 3 or 4, so let’s not put her up there in the pantheon just yet.
I remember reading (or seeing?) an interview with her around the time she released Into White, where she talked about her struggle with Cancer, how it affected her songwriting, and her ongoing struggle with record companies, who would prefer that she record albums of covers, which have outsold her original material in the past couple of decades, over albums of her original songs. I remember being so angry that someone with the talent and “greatest hits” of a Carly Simon would still have to answer to record label executives rather than simply make her music.
I have no idea if her later songs are as good as her earlier songs. Like Dana and Doug, I find much on the Working Girl soundtrack to be wonderful, but I simply don’t know much of the rest. I do know that I take the critical consensus with a grain of salt, as the critics tend to have a sort of pack mentality, crowning this or that artist the next greatest thing, abandoning another artist as washed up or irrelevant. I don’t know what the critical consensus is on most of my favorite artists/albums, and it wouldn’t matter.
Still, I’m intrigued by this whole thread and intend to go listen to some Simon penned tunes from the past 15 or so years. It should be an enjoyable experiment.
Apparently Lucinda Williams has been writing and performing songs since the 70’s (see allmusic.com) 🙂 so I’m writing the response Clay otherwise surely would.
Er..okay, but who the hell ever heard of her until this decade? I know I hadn’t. SO, how good was that 70/s, 80/s and 90/s work?
I’ve never heard of half of the artists who appear on this blog before Clay introduces me to them, so I’m not going down that road. I will simply say that critical or public adoration rarely translates to whether I will like a particular artist or album.
I go back to my earlier comment regarding all artists. Some are prolific; others take years to create their next work of art. Some are embraced by critics; others are not. Some have a single work with which they will always be identfied, regardless of what else of worth they might produce. I was reading a review of Toni Morrison’s newest novel and reflecting on how bittersweet it must be to have created a work so powerful (in her case – Beloved) that anything else you ever create will be compared unfavorably to it. Maybe if you are so associated with an era, as Carly Simon is with the 70’s or Bob Dylan with the 60’s, you simply can’t break out of that shell. While Clay buys and enjoys Dylan’s later albums, I don’t recall them burning up any charts or winning any awards. Maybe society deems an artist belongs to a certain time. Then it’s the next artist’s turn.
Williams has been around for awhile but she’s far from prolific. She put out a small-label covers album in 1979 then an album of original material in 1980 that’s quite good.
In 1988 she released her self-titled album that’s an absolute classic (it’s the one that features ‘Passionate Kisses’ and ‘Change the Locks’ and others that have been widely covered). In the 90s she released Sweet Old World, another wonderful album, and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which I’ve salivated over enough on this blog already.
Well, Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (two albums ago) won the Best Album Grammy and last year’s Modern Times debuted at #1 on Billboard and received some of the best reviews of his career.
Dylan is certainly most associated with the 60s and 70s but his work in the 90s and 00s has been extremely well-received.
Your Carly Simon tale is disheartening. It’s a shame to see the commerce so negatively impact the art. I definitely think there are many different kinds of artists, in terms of quantity and quality of output, and I guess the question I wanted to explore in this blog entry is why some seem to shine so brightly and then fade away.
As Amy corrected me, I will correct her and say that Dylan’s last several albums have been very well received critically and have won awards, but have not been huge commercial successes.
But I also agree with Amy’s other point, which is critics tend to have a few artists that they adore and rarely criticize too harshly. I’m fairly convinced that Springsteen could release complete crap and it would at least get a B from Rolling Stone. Ditto with Dylan, the Rolling Stones, David Byrne and Neil Young, . Other artists, who I think are incredibly talendted songwriters, rarely catch a break from critics, including, most notoriously, Billy Joel. He used to infamously rip up Rolling Stone reviews on stage before crowds of 20,000 screaming fans. Then, he actually stayed around long enough to make nice with that magazine, and they praised him for some of his later (and, to me, lesser) work. So, I agree that, if Carly Simon was never on the “it” list, she would be diregarded by critics, but this would not necessarily translate into lesser work.
I agree that music critics tend to have favorites. One reason I like AllMusic is that it isn’t the product of one magazine or one writer. It’s a compendium of many critics with the goal of presenting each artist’s career over a span of time.
Granted, I don’t always agree with their ratings, but they seem to get it right (in my view) more often than not. And they don’t seem to fall into the ‘elitist critics’ trap. Take Billy Joel… in the write-up they say he has never been a critic’s favorite and they go on to give 4 stars or higher to seven of his albums.
Carly has never really been favored by critics. In this case I think even AllMusic is a bit guilty of this, too. They’re usually a pretty good gauge, but I think they lean a bit too heavy on her sometimes.
I think the last milestone album she released was The Bedroom Tapes, which was in 2000. (Although I don’t have her newest album This Kind Of Love yet for some silly reason.) It was all written by her, and there are a couple tracks (“I Forget” and “Scar”) that deal with her battle with cancer with such honesty and vulnerability, it’s right up there with the unfortunate sadness of “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” (possibly my favorite Carly song).
Letters Never Sent from 1994 is also really good, with the epic “Touched by the Sun”.
I also understand Have You Seen Me Lately? from 1990 is quite good, but I don’t have that one yet either.
And of course Coming Around Again. I haven’t seen Boys In The Trees or Hotcakes mentioned yet. I think both of those are right up there along side No Secrets. Anticipation is great, too.
I’d say at least once or twice a decade she’s put out a worthy album. That’s a fairly decent track record. As was mentioned, she’s unfortunately had to fight with record execs quite a bit. Just look at how many labels she’s been with. I guess at least 6. Makes it difficult to create freely when you’re constantly having to prove yourself and convince others an original album instead of another covers album is worth their time.
Thanks for the tips. I’ll definitely plan to check those albums out.