Featured Essay: The Cozy Domesticity of Carly Simon

by Meaghan Steeves

A lot of people talk about an old tune that takes you back to when you were younger and the song was everywhere. While that holds true for me about a lot of 90s and early aughts songs, it’s music from decades earlier where my nostalgia lies. Why? Because that’s what I grew up listening to during countless campfires and family gatherings and car rides with my dad. 1960s music was a popular choice too, but the 70s and 80s were when my dad and his siblings were young adults, so I think that’s why that era made up most of what the adults played around me, my sister, and our cousins. Some CDs played on repeat were from Patsy Cline, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Queen, Abba, Chicago, Elton John, and Billy Joel. By the time I was thirty I, too, loved all these artists and spent my free time jamming to them along with similar big names like Pat Benatar, Diana Ross, Barry Manilow, Christopher Cross, Bee Gees, Dionne Warwick, Dolly Parton, Lionel Ritchie, and Carly Simon.

There’s so much to admire about Carly Simon’s music, especially her biggest tracks. 1972’s “You’re So Vain” isn’t strictly a revenge track, but its powerful criticism of self-absorption is unmistakable, while her performance of the ballad “Nobody Does It Better” for the 1977 Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me is just plain sexy, lyrically and in execution. Her ode to the working class, “Let the River Run,” written for the 1989 film Working Girl, makes you want to go after your ambitions and the life you want with everything you’ve got.

But another noteworthy track, and hit song for Simon, was “Coming Around Again,” penned for the 1986 Mike Nichols film Heartburn, based on the Nora Ephron novel. It’s about motherhood and being a wife, in every aspect of its ups and downs. Heartburn was a movie I watched at the peak of my Ephron phase, and it and Working Girl kickstarted my love of Carly Simon. Her voice is so raw and emotive, and it was with “Coming Around Again” and other songs that I began to notice a theme of home life in her lyrics. She’s all about relationships, and not just the romantic kind, as her songs are also often about family.

“Coming Around Again” is truly as domestic as it gets. A perfectly blissful portrait is initially painted of a life that is “So good on paper/So romantic” but the tone gradually shifts to “Then you break a window/Burn the soufflé/Scream the lullaby.” There’s a realness to it, showing that as wonderful and unified as family life can be, it can also be difficult and unbearable.

The second big song to come out of Heartburn is a cover of the nursery rhyme “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” sung at the end of the movie, when Meryl Streep decides to pursue life as a single mother. Streep and her daughter sing it on the plane, and a reprise of the base notes of “Coming Around Again” turns into the “Spider” cover, and you wouldn’t think it would work but it does. It adds a note of hopeful perseverance and trying to be happy again, which reflects (I think) the message of the movie.

“Coming Around Again” describes marriage and motherhood in a series of scenes, but a similar precursor is her first single, 1971’s “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be.” There’s soooo much to talk about here. In this song, she tells a narrative of walking through the house past her parents, who are spending downtime in different rooms from each other. It’s not sunshine and rainbows—it’s what can happen many years into being married. Here it appears they’ve run out of things to say, and don’t seek one another’s company. In the next verse she talks about her college friends all being married with houses and lawns, and how they were disappointed by the result of their unions, with “Tearful nights, angry dawns.”

The whole song is about how she thinks that building a life with her partner is what she’s supposed to want, but really she’s going along with what her boyfriend wants. She hates to think she’ll be caged in, and knows that if she goes straight from living at home to getting married she won’t have the sense of independence in knowing she could make it on her own. There’s an undercurrent of “Will this be a mistake?” “Will our love persist, or will we end up like my parents and my friends?” The end of the song is a little ambiguous, but it implies she decides to take the plunge.

Though I haven’t listened to Simon’s entire discography, I would venture to guess that the most domestic-centered album is her fourth. Hotcakes, objectively, is a very happy album, and it’s immediately plain when you look at the cover, depicting a grinning and pregnant Simon, who is the picture of an excited mother-to-be. This joy is further emphasized by the single “I Think I’m Gonna Have a Baby,” where Simon spins metaphors and sings “Babies do such nice things, they rock on your knee.”

The title song “Hotcakes” is later in the track list. At just over a minute long, it has a boppy, soul refrain that makes you want to hit the kitchen with your frying pan; it was stuck in my head for days. Earlier on is the song “Older Sister,” which excellently encapsulates the longing to be like one’s older sister and why, singing “She turns everybody’s heads/While I wear her last year’s threads.” But one of the hottest melodies was “Mockingbird,” a funky vocal interplay between Simon and then-husband James Taylor. It takes the usual baby out of the equation and makes it a partnership of mutual giving, be it a mockingbird, a diamond ring or “piece of mind.”

The domesticity that Simon describes in a lot of her songs may be viewed as comforting in the sense that they’re familiar to a lot of us. I can remember being a little kid and assuming that when I grew up, I would marry a man, have a house and kids, and stay in my hometown. While this hasn’t been my experience, I still appreciate Simon singing about it. And while not everyone wants a baby or a house or has a sister or a partner, the themes in Hotcakes, and in Simon’s other music from the 70s and 80s, of being in a family, our relationships therein, and the milestones a lot of us value, are timeless.

Meaghan Steeves is a freelance editor and writer based in Nova Scotia. Her writing has appeared in Oh Reader, Little White Lies, Mslexia, and Hard Copy Media. She loves her small dog and spends her leisure time reading, baking, and watching documentaries. You can find her at choicewordsediting.com, or on Instagram @choicewordsedit.