Carly Simon’s Top 10 Most Famous Tracks
Carly Simon admits she owes much of the success of her live performances to spanks. No, not the famed shapewear, but literal spanks. “Sometimes the physical pain of being spanked overcame my heart fluttering and my panic,” Simon told Billboard of learning to overcome her sometimes debilitating stage fright. “One thing that I made a habit of the last 10 years of performing was that my band would have to spank me before I went on stage. And they’d spank me so loud and so hard that I’d be stinging by the time I went on.… You can double it up with a rubber band around your wrist. But the spank is more unusual, it gets people laughing.”
Laughing’s just one way to draw out the singer-songwriter’s megawatt smile, though she certainly has plenty to be happy about looking back on her long and equally-as-brilliant career, which started off alongside sister Lucy as The Simon Sisters. Her solo status then took off with a win as Best New Artist at 1972’s Grammys and she’s continued to score a string of hits, winning over new generations of fans — including Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo — every note of the way.
“Weaving together fierce intelligence, soulful honesty and vulnerability, Carly made…record after record that transcended any one genre or any one generation of storytellers,” noted Sarah Bareilles during Simon's 2022 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, praising “the elegance of her melodies” and her “singular, unforgettable voice, [which is] an arrow of truth that tells it like it really is.”
“Her songs are like a great collection of short stories, the kind you read over and over again as they continue to reveal new truths every time you encounter them,” Bareilles added of Simon, now 81, who also entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994.
So even if you haven’t got time for the pain, do make the time to give a listen to this collection of Carly Simon’s greatest hits.
10. “Coming Around Again” (1986)
“Being able to embrace the broken heart, not just cast it off as having no meaning or trying to get rid of it” is the key takeaway, Simon told NPR of this standout tune she penned for the film Heartburn.
9. “Let the River Run” (1989)
This gem from the film Working Girl swept best original song honors at the Grammys, the Golden Globes, and the Oscars. It’s a “glorious hymn to female fortitude,” RogerEbert.com insists, adding that the “anthem earns it keep by setting the right ‘you go girl’ mood.”
8. “You Belong to Me” (1978)
This sleek entry — a collaboration with the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald —nabbed Simon a Grammy nomination and went all the way to No. 6 on the charts, making it one of her biggest commercial successes.
7. “Mockingbird” (1974)
“Prancing!” That’s how Simon described her and then-husband James Taylor’s dancing at 1979’s No Nukes concert as they performed their fun remake of Inez and Charlie Foxx’s 1963 original, as she explained to Pop Matters.
6. “Nobody Does It Better” (1977)
“I think [this] was the perfect song and I was the perfect artist for it at the time,” Simon told Billboard about her shot at becoming part of the Bond, James Bond, franchise. She sure hit her mark with the tune, which was composed by Marvin Hamlisch with lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager. “It just fit my voice. It was quite wonderful.”
5. “The Right Thing to Do” (1973)
Let’s close now … “Sonically, ‘The Right Thing to Do’ has all the hallmarks of adult contemporary perfection,” declares Pop Matters of this track Simon wrote about her romance with her future husband. “It actually was one of my absolutely undisputed songs about James [Taylor], written three months into our relationship,” she said, according to the biography More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon.
4. “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” (1971)
The artist’s first Top 10 single remains one of her most haunting, with its dramatic composition and stark, complicated musings on relationships and marriage. “When I first wrote it I thought it was an unusual thing for people to break up, and now all my friends are divorced,” she told the Independent of the track, which she crafted with her good friend and frequent collaborator, lyricist Jacob Brackman.
3. “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” (1974)
Though it contained lines like “suffering was the only thing that made me feel I was alive,” this song got snatched up to promote Medipren, an ibuprofen pill, in the late 80s. Then-husband James Taylor plays guitar on the track and their bitter split years later in 1983, Simon told People, led her to seek relief in pain pills for a brief period.
2. “Anticipation” (1971)
The fact that the genius of this song survived despite it being used in a 70s ad campaign for Heinz ketchup speaks to Simon’s talents. She wrote it, she revealed in a Grammy Foundation Living History interview while waiting roughly 40 minutes for Cat Stevens to show up for dinner. “I caught myself not living in the moment,” she said of deciding to turn her growing anxiety into a tune, and it paid off as one of her most memorable hits.
1. “You’re So Vain” (1972)
Son of a gun… “It was the shot heard ’round the world,” Taylor Swift noted of this No. 1 classic from Simon, which topped Swift’s Music That Made Me list for Rolling Stone. “I was a poetry-obsessed preteen the first time I heard that incredibly genius kiss-off … [and] after hearing that, it was like a key had just unlocked this forbidden area of storytelling for me. You can say exactly what you feel, even if it’s bitter and brazen!”
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