I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t share my friends’ almost universal adoration of Carly Simon’s seminal 1972 LP No Secrets. Many of its melodies are luscious, their sound fully realized by a cast of thousands, and at least three of its songs are absolutely essential inclusions in the pop canon. And “You’re So Vain” has always been one of my very favorite songs.
So how is it I have such mixed feelings about the LP? I wracked my brain and listened to the album then listened to it again and then it came to me—it’s the lyrics. Simon’s pop craft is formidable. But all too often the words that come out of her mouth are stilted and don’t ring true. Odd how the woman whose “You’re So Vain,” the best put-down song since Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” sounds so infuriating vague and hackneyed elsewhere.
But there’s something even more important going on, and I’ll get to it later. Suffice it to say that, unlike your truly great singer/ songwriters, Simon’s lyrics fail to establish a persona with a unique slant on the world. Or to put it more bluntly, I have trouble detecting an actual personality. I know who Bob Dylan is and what he thinks through his songs. I know who Join Mitchell is and what she thinks through her songs. I don’t know who Carly Simon is. All I know is she has a wonderful voice.
Critics have made much of her privileged background—her father is the Simon of publishing house Simon & Schuster—and that both matters and doesn’t. They say write about what you know, and on “You’re So Vain” she does just that, and I think the song holds the secret of who she really is, but chooses not to be. It’s both a triumph and the key to her failure as a great artist. It was her chance to establish herself as a totally unique voice, rather than just an artist with a uniquely great voice.
Opener “The Right Thing to Do” is gorgeous, a lush and perfectly realized pop song with a pristine arrangement and a simple message that Simon puts across with passion. The trouble starts with follow-up “The Carter Family,” which is as catchy as a baseball glove with a hole in it and features the unfortunate lyrics of Jacob Brackman. Brackman has written some good lyrics for Simon but on “The Carter Family” what he pushes in our general direction is a Harry Chapin story song about only appreciating what you have after you’ve lost it, a theme that Joni Mitchell summed up far more concisely with the lines “Don’t it always seem to go/You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”
Her friend next door, her granny, a lover with rough manners and a penchant for off-color jokes—Simon runs down the litany of those she failed to appreciate while they were around. And what I hear are cliches that don’t correspond to Simon’s lived reality. The only lines that strike home, that seem honest to me because they dovetail with the upper crust milieu of “You’re So Vain,” are the ones that go, “Don’t know just what I wanted/But I know I wanted more/Someone smooth, presentable/To blend with my décor.”
“You’re So Vain” is one of the best songs of the seventies in part because of its insinuating and sinuous melody, but for the larger part because Simon’s clever and clinical evisceration of her mystery ladies’ man’s epic egotism is situated in a milieu she knows inside out–the jet-setting affluent. Simon tosses perfectly telling details about her womanizing ex-lover–he has one eye on himself in the mirror and walks “into the party” like he’s “walking onto a yacht.” And the lines, “Well you’re where you should be all the time/And when you’re not, you’re with some underworld spy/Or the wife of a close friend wife of a close friend” are spot-on perfect. And that “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you” is possibly the best example of character assassination since Bob Dylan sang, “When you know as well as me/You’d rather see me paralyzed” in “Positively 4th Street.”
“His Friends Are More Than Fond of Robin” is too precious for my taste, too pretty and too lyrically vacuous—Simon tells me nothing about this Robin she wants to grow old with, and it’s as if she’s thrown everything she knows about painting a precise picture of a character off the yacht. Robin is a cipher, a name and nothing more, and as a result the song is a cipher too. “His friends are more than fond of Robin,” she sings, “He doesn’t need to compliment them/And always as he leaves he leaves them/Feeling proud just to know him.” Generalities, bland and banal generalities. No spies or clouds in the coffee or total eclipses of the sun here—I know nothing about this guy and I never will.
“We Have No Secrets” has the same slinky vibe as “You’re So Vain” musically, which is to say it’s perfect radio fare and hits home for me in a way that other, slower Simon classics like “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” don’t. It has bounce, and a healthy color in its cheeks. The sentiment behind its lyrics is hardly atom-smashing, but the lyrics don’t stop me, disappointed, in my tracks, and for the most part I’m content simply to ignore them.
“Embrace Me, You Child” is a big production number with orchestra, synthesizer, and woodwind arrangements by Paul Buckmaster (who knows about such things having produced Elton John). And it really hits you where you live when things reach a crescendo as she sings the title. Unfortunately the lyrics are a muddle—God and the daddy next door sing harmony, then daddy dies and God comes down from heaven and Carly feels abandoned and I really don’t care, frankly. And who’s the child in the title? Perhaps I’m just slow. I’ve been told I’m slow. But I will tell you this—Simon is often a very bad poet. She wrote a great short story when she wrote “You’re So Vain” but “Embrace Me, You Child” is strictly eighth grade poetry notebook stuff.
And speaking of eighth grade poetry notebooks, and daddy for that matter, the musically excellent “Waited So Long” is a lyrical morass that finally opened my eyes to what I so dislike about No Secrets. It’s all daddy issues and has Carly telling her daddy she’s no virgin. As a rule this is something you’d only tell daddy in a screaming match, and Carly isn’t screaming. And if she isn’t a virgin what does she mean by she’s waited too long? I don’t know. What I do know is there should probably be a law forbidding everyone but Sylvia Plath from talking to daddy in verse. And what bothers me most about it is there’s no connecting its adolescent tone with the sophisticated tone of “You’re So Vain.” I simply can’t connect the dots, and that goes for most of the rest of the songs as well.
In “Your So Vain” Simon sings about a world she knows something about, and her eye for the telling detail is nothing less than brilliant. In “Waited So Long” she’s playing a role, and the result is a thematic disconnect I find almost schizophrenic. The world Simon knows is the world of the rich, who as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote are not like you and me, and I’d love to know more about that world. It’s as if for one brief and shining moment Simon did Joni Mitchell one better as a social observer of the well-to-do, then retreated to the world of the popular song and the garbled sentiments of “Waited So Long” and the equally false sounding “It Was So Easy.” Which has a nice pop country feel and a fetching melody and is certainly easy on the ears but let’s face it, everything Simon knows about the country is most likely situated at a very expensive summer house in Martha’s Vineyard—a subject I would very much like to hear her sing about.
Simon’s take on soon-to-be-hubby James Taylor’s funky-for-a-white guy “Night Owl” has punch, lots of cool backing vocals gratis Bonnie Bramlett, Paul and Linda McCartney, and the great Doris Troy and some great sax by Bobby Keys, and almost succeeds in expunging from her permanent record the infuriating cloying “Mockingbird.” And by “almost” I mean almost.
Album closer “When You Close Your Eyes” gets the big string treatment and features a powerful vocal performance by Simon, and it’s hard to not get caught in the undertow of the mighty (and very Captain Fantastic) orchestral swell over which she sings “Big surprise, you’ve been informed you’re not asleep/Hard as you try you were never really meant to weep.” The lyrics are from the pen of singer/songwriter Billy Merritt and while they hardly shine they pass muster. But in the end I’m left wishing Simon had written them herself, with one foot in Central Park West and the other in Max’s Kansas City, where she’s busy exchanging gossip with Elizabeth Taylor and Pauline Kael.
Carly Simon makes beautiful music, but her lyrics are all cognitive dissonance—she doesn’t do what great songwriters do, which is establish a one of a kind lyrical voice that situates her in a world she alone can sing about. The distance between “The Carter Family” and “You’re So Vain” can’t be measured in miles—the two exist in different realms of existence altogether, and only one of them rings true. Singer/songwriters like Joni Mitchell create a locus of the imagination that coheres and then proceed to sing about its attitudes and its inhabitants. Simon created a cosmos in miniature with “You’re So Vain,” but she didn’t follow through. To paraphrase Apocalypse Now, never get off the yacht, Carly. Never get off the yacht.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
