Carly Simon: Top 5 Songs That Defined a Voice and an Era

Few artists of the 1970s and 1980s wrote with the candor, wit, and emotional precision of Carly Simon. A Grammy winner from her very first album, she built a catalog that ranged from confessional folk-pop to Bond themes to Oscar-winning film music — always with her voice at the center, warm and direct, never quite what you expected next. These are the five songs that best capture what made her singular.

1. You’re So Vain (1972)

There are songs that define a decade and songs that define a conversation — and this one, somehow, does both. Released in late 1972 from the album No Secrets, it reached number one in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in early 1973, making Carly Simon a household name overnight. The production is immaculate: Klaus Voormann’s bass guitar introduction sets the scene before the verse even begins, and Mick Jagger’s backing vocal — uncredited at the time — gives the chorus a weight that only deepened the song’s mystique. At its heart is something deceptively simple: a portrait of a certain kind of man, drawn with such precise, unhurried contempt that it has never aged. The subject’s identity became one of pop music’s most durable mysteries. Simon eventually confirmed that one of the three men the song references is actor Warren Beatty — who, when told, reportedly said he was flattered. The song earned three Grammy nominations including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Rolling Stone has placed it among the greatest songs ever recorded. It remains the defining moment of Simon’s career and one of the most instantly recognizable openings in the history of popular music.

2. Anticipation (1971)

The story of how this song was written has become part of its mythology, and for good reason: Simon composed it in forty-five minutes while waiting for Cat Stevens to pick her up for a date. What emerged was not a throwaway but one of the most honest and melodically generous songs of the early 1970s singer-songwriter movement. Released in 1971 as both a single and the title track of her second album, it reached the top twenty on the Billboard Hot 100 and established a template for confessional pop that dozens of artists would spend the rest of the decade chasing. The lyric holds the tension between the excitement of what might happen and the quiet wisdom of staying present — not a small thing to pull off in a pop song, and Simon does it without effort. The arrangement is sparse, the guitar part central and unhurried, and her voice carries the song’s emotional logic entirely on its own. A later generation encountered it through Heinz ketchup commercials, which introduced the word “anticipation” to an entirely new audience. That association has never diluted what the song actually is: a document of a very specific feeling, caught in the forty-five minutes before someone knocked on a door.

3. Nobody Does It Better (1977)

Composed by Marvin Hamlisch with lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager, this was written as the title theme for The Spy Who Loved Me, the tenth James Bond film, released in 1977 with Roger Moore in the lead role. What could have been a reliable piece of cinematic wallpaper turned into something considerably more: the number one Adult Contemporary hit of the entire year, spending seven consecutive weeks at the top of that chart. It reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, held back only by Debby Boone’s extraordinary run with You Light Up My Life. The song earned nominations for Song of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female, at the Grammy Awards. Simon’s voice is the whole argument here — the orchestral arrangement by Hamlisch is lush and confident, but it is the way she delivers the title line, with warmth rather than boast, that gives the song its lasting appeal. USA Today later ranked it the greatest James Bond theme ever recorded. Billboard placed it second. Rolling Stone put it third. Whichever list you consult, the conclusion is the same: in a genre that had already produced Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger and Paul McCartney’s Live and Let Die, Simon found a register that was entirely her own.

4. Coming Around Again (1986)

Written for Mike Nichols’ film Heartburn — the thinly veiled account of Nora Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson — this song marked a major commercial and artistic return for Simon after a difficult stretch through the early 1980s. The album of the same name, released in 1987, reached the top five on the Billboard 200 and gave Simon four top-ten Adult Contemporary hits simultaneously, a feat that underlined just how completely she had reclaimed her footing. The song itself is a meditation on marriage and endurance — on the cycles that repeat in long relationships, the ways love requires daily renewal. There is nothing sentimental about it; the lyric is clear-eyed and slightly weary in exactly the right proportion. The arrangement, produced by Russ Kunkel and Scott Litt alongside Simon, frames her voice with a warmth that suits the song’s particular emotional temperature. The official music video, shot in a domestic setting with a visual intimacy that matched the song’s themes, received heavy rotation on MTV and VH1. For many listeners, this is the Carly Simon record that sounds most like a complete thought — a song that knows what it is trying to say and says it without excess.

5. Let the River Run (1988)

Written entirely by Simon for Mike Nichols’ 1988 film Working Girl — which starred Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, and Sigourney Weaver — this song made history in a way that still stands alone. It became the first piece of work by a single artist to win the Academy Award, the Grammy Award, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song in the same year. No one had done it before. No one has done it since. Simon wrote it as a declaration of ambition and arrival: the film’s opening sequence, with the camera sweeping over New York Harbor toward the Manhattan skyline while the song builds from a single voice to full orchestration, remains one of the most effective uses of popular music in cinema. The lyric draws on imagery of rivers and cities and possibility — grand material that Simon handles without grandeur, keeping the human voice at the center of something that could easily have become overblown. The Grammy she accepted was for Best Original Song Written for a Motion Picture. The Oscar was for Best Original Song. The Golden Globe was for Best Original Song. Three different institutions, three different nights, one song. For a writer who had spent nearly two decades demonstrating that confessional pop and genuine craft were not mutually exclusive, this was the moment the rest of the world caught up.