Good morning!

October 7, 2014 • 5:08 am

Carly Simon (b. 1945) seems to have disappeared from the music scene, but for a while she was very visible. Her reluctance to perform live and her stage fright were famous, but they’re not at all visible in this wonderful rendition of one of her classic songs, “That’s the way I’ve always heard it should be.” It was written by Simon and Jacob Brackman, released in 1971, and performed here that same year in Central Park. You’ll recognize the two men chatting before the songs begins.

The song was quite unusual for its time, for it’s a bittersweet ballad about a woman, daughter of a bad marriage, who’s pondering getting married herself, plagued by thoughts of other bad marriages she’s seen and the faults of her partner. Ultimately she decides to “settle,” something I’ve seen many times among my acquaintances.

It has not escaped my notice that Simon married James Taylor the next year, a marriage that lasted eleven years and produced two children.

As Wikipedia notes about the song, “Elektra staffers were worried the single was too emotionally complex to be released as Simon’s first single.” Good thing they decided to go ahead with it: it’s not only a fantastic song, but it made Simons’s reputation.

 

56 thoughts on “Good morning!”

      1. Alright, I figured it out with Google. The bearded guy is George Harrison who also sadly just parted ways with the Beatles.

          1. Definitely George Harrison looking very much like he did in his Saturday Night Live skit where Lorne Michaels is upset that he only got one Beatle when he expected all four.

    1. Some I can play , some I can’t in recent one or two weeks. app dead and wifi drop for no reason, but things are getting back day by day, guess Apple working hard to fix the problem, but why let the problems out at the first place?

      1. Yes iOS8 is buggy. Scientific American is extending my subscription by 2 weeks because I can’t use their app.

        Why did they let the bugs out – I suspect one of two things (as is typical when releasing software/products/services): they knew they had bugs but needed to hit a target so they accepted them and created a KIL (Known Issues List) 2) They didn’t know they had the bugs because of poor testing due to time constraints.

        I suspect some of both but the really bad ones, I suspect fall under 2.

        1. Yeah, apps just go to black out of the blue ( to mix metaphors). Kindle app especially bad. Got to open it twice every time. And what’s with this new black banner-like thing at the top that tells you you’ve got mail? And which covers the Fwd and Del options…

          1. I love mixed metaphors. Don’t know why that one is making me smile so much 🙂

        1. I connect Digifit to my Garmin heart monitor & foot pod sensors using an ANT+ interface to my iPad. I went back to using my 1st gen iPad for this because as soon as I upgraded my iPad Air to iOS8, the application no longer saw the sensors. 🙁

    3. I haven’t been able to view embedded videos on my iPad in ages and I haven’t upgraded yet.

  4. Odd enough, James Taylor does have a couple good songs. I remember his album was on bn display shelf for a long time in the 90s, but he was the one I refused to know & refused to buy for no outstanding reason. :)))

    1. A couple of good songs? That’s nearly a banning offense. He has several dozen classic songs, and very few duds. I won’t name them here, but I’ve featured some on the past.

      1. Sorry, guess I haven’t started to listen to your lecture yet when you listed James Taylor’s songs. :))

      3. James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Carole King – all connected and all brilliant.

  6. Great song that was (and is) not played enough even back in the day. I remember hearing it played once on Sirius XM sat radio on the 70’s channel. More often played is her biggest hit, You’re So Vain with Mick Jagger singing backup vocals.

    Arthur Garfunkel appears at 0:09 to 0:23 with who I think is a young and bearded Dan Fogelberg. Of course, Simon and Garfunkel had sadly parted ways.

    1. Harrison and Lennon were the two most thoughtful and reflective of the Beatles though Harrison became a practicing Hare Krishna while Lennon was an atheist.

    3. I’m pretty sure Mick Jagger sings on that song (you can make out what sounds like his voice), which has led to speculation that it was him. But Carly Simon has never divulged the answer, and so we just don’t know.

      1. Yeah, most def Mick on backups, but if it was actually about him I can’t imagine his singing You’re so vain…My money’s on Warren.

  12. I never realized what great gams Carly Simon has. Barbara Walters is right – the legs go last. 🙂

    3. Go last? She was all of 26 in this performance! She was gorgeous and I was struck by the sweetness and clarity of her voice. I couldn’t help but contrast it with the singing voice of Britney Spears I recently heard, sans engineering.

      1. She really had a beautiful voice, I forgot how beautiful she was, too. When listening to the song, I kept wondering if any couples in the audience were on a first date. Could be awkward…

      2. Yes I didn’t mean to imply her gams had already deteriorated. I suspect they are still good. As I watch myself decay, the legs do go last, just as Barbara said.

        1. I have an enduring and disagreeable memory of Barbara Walters on January 20, 2001, earlier in the day prior to the inauguration of George W. Bush, on television uttering pearls of wisdom regarding what she words-to-the-effect alleged to be the unimaginative aesthetics of the design of the kitchen of the Bush home in Crawford, TX, and of the name of the Bush d*g. She made sure that viewers understood that she cared for neither, as if her interjected egregious, gratuitous little personal digs/opinions about such matters were possibly worth hearing. She was quite deserving of Gilda Radner’s “Barbara Wah-Wah” “Saturday Night Live” send-up of some years earlier.

          Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 02:46:55 +0000 To: dwsingrs@hotmail.com

    4. I’m SO pleased you mentioned that. I thought it must just be me…

      And that dress makes the most of them too. 🙂 <- Happy little grin

  13. By “complex “, they might also have meant pragmatic. Life is not fairy tales, unlike typical love songs, one needs to take chances and run with them. This song is indeed about realizing that.

  14. I saw Carly Simon when she was just starting out…as an opening act to Cat Stevens!! I didn’t know who she was and was quite struck. I”m pretty sure she sang this song.

  15. “Elektra staffers were worried the single was too emotionally complex to be released as Simon’s first single.”

    Is that to say that Elektra staffers didn’t think the archetypical pop music consumer was inclined or able to handle “emotionally complex” sentiments in a song? By “handle” I mean “think” about seriously. Re: Bertrand Russell quote on thinking and dying.

    Sounds like the crowd ate it up. I certainly appreciated, and appreciate, its serious theme.

    1. I would have thought the tune was more likely to fail to appeal to archetypal pop music consumers than the sentiments. In other words, put the phone book to a catchy tune with a good beat and it would sell…

      I can think of innumerable popular songs whose words were cryptic or didn’t make very much sense at first sight, and it never impaired their acceptance. Anything from A Day in the Life to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ (just two examples off the top of my head…)

      Or is ’emotionally complex’ code for ‘downbeat’ – if so they were flat out wrong. A million sad love songs attest to that.

      2. So, she did a downbeat song. In close proximity to that she had the upbeat “Anticipation.” There’s a lot to be said for anticipation; puts a spring in ones step.

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