When I was a kid, my mother used to play music on a wooden console stereo that was as big as a buffet table. She would listen to Charlie Rich, James Taylor, Englebert Humperdinck and the artist I remember the most was Carly Simon. I remember her doing the family laundry in the basement while listening to No Secrets and Hotcakes. I loved Carly's songs and her voice. She wasn't the most technically-perfect singer, but she sang from her heart. Her lyrics seemed to be all about the how strange, mysterious and wonderful being a grown-up was. And when I was a kid, adulthood was unknowable but seductive. She sang about love and sex and men and childhood turning to adulthood. She sang a song about a little girl who sneaks out of bed and quietly watches the grown ups who are having a party. The little girl is mystified by their talk and their actions, but she longs to be one of them. Then she grows up, is at a party herself and sees a little girl sneaking a peek at the party. She remembers how grown up and sophisticated she thought adults were when she was a kid. Now as an adult, she realizes she doesn't have any more answers than she did back then. I loved that song because I used to watch the adults at dinner parties at our house and think to myself how wonderful it would be to be one of them.
She was so perfectly 70s. On the cover of No Secrets, she is pictured wearing a floppy maroon hat and a clingy blue shirt. One thing she is not wearing is a bra. Also very 70s. Her nipples shown through the shirt as big as gumballs. I thought she was so together, so brave and so confident to let them just show like that. Still, her songs revealed that she didn't have all the answers and was still working things out. She didn't seem entirely sure of who she was, who she wanted to be or who the world thought she should be. I thought she was great. I wanted to grow up to be Carly Simon.
Of course as I grew older and learned more about the real details of her life and her romances, her lyrics became much more meaningful to me, in an adult way. My twenties were nothing like her twenties but I wished they had been. Writing songs and falling in love with deep, handsome, creative men who then turn out to be horrible heroin addicts. My twenties were spent writing juvenile journal entries and falling in love with deep handsome men who turned out to be homosexuals. Not quite the same thing. But I lived vicariously through Carly. Her experiences became mine through her songs. Now I am in my forties and I still listen to her songs. And I still wish I had grown up to be Carly Simon.
