Carly Simon

Carly Simon (b. June 25th, 1945)

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SIMON SAYS STANDARDS

On Moonlight Serenade, Carly Croons the Classics
While it may seem like every Boomer-generation pop star has followed Rod Stewart’s multi-platinum lead and jumped on the Great American Songbook for career resuscitation, don’t count Carly Simon in that bunch. Back in 1981, with Torch, this vocal icon of four-plus decades' standing brought her lustrous tones to standards -- long before the majority of her colleagues would have ever thought of mining the pre-rock era for hits. Over the years, Simon has continued to revisit older repertoire; her fourth standards project, Moonlight Serenade pairs her with producer Richard Perry, the studio mastermind behind her wildly successful albums of the 1970s. Ted Panken spoke to Simon about her commitment to classic composers, the art of songwriting, and an unexpected encounter with Cat Stevens.

Barnes & Noble.com: Why is this the time for another standards record?

Carly Simon: Richard Perry and I were looking around for another project to make, and last October he said, "I've got a track that I made for Rod Stewart, and he didn't do it; do you think you could put your voice to it and see what it sounds like?" He sent "My One and Only Love" to me on Martha's Vineyard. I did it and sent it back to Los Angeles. Richard really liked it. Then he tweaked the track, and I thought that was it, that this was just fun and games. Then he said, "Well, let's do a few more, and I'll come in to New York." He had "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "In the Still of the Night," and we went into the studio and sang to these tracks he'd made in Los Angeles. That's how it proceeded. I had little bits of time here and there, and we made the record piecemeal over the course of three or four months. Richard was very involved in making the tracks in Los Angeles. We decided on the tunes together, we talked about the key and the arrangement before he went in to do it, and I'd listen to the arrangement on the telephone as he was doing it, but it was mainly Richard who was the godfather or the grandfather or whatever of this album.

B&N.com: "Alone Together" is a bossa. Was that his idea or yours?

CS: That happened later, when we did it in New York. I'd intended to record Arthur Schwartz's "Dancing in the Dark" before I realized it would be a difficult tune to make work, with my vocal range. My good friend Jonathan Schwartz, the composer's son, suggested "Alone Together," which he said his father wrote for his mother, who was my mother's best friend. That's one of the songs that I had the most input in, and I wanted to do it with a bossa nova feel.

B&N.com: Are most of these songs old friends?

CS: That's a very good way to put it. A lot of the composers were friends of my parents, and I listened to these songs from the time I was three or four, and I got them under my skin! They were definitely songs that I grew up with. I mean, they weren't the only ones. As time went by, I started listening to jazz and folk music and rock 'n' roll.

B&N.com: To what degree were you influenced by other singers' interpretations of these songs?

CS: I didn't want to be that interpretive. Whereas Billie Holiday is the perfect interpretive singer, and more of a jazz singer, I wanted to do what Frank Sinatra did, in revering and tipping my hat to the actual tune, the way it was written on the sheet music. It's a ballroom album, and in the ballroom tradition -- in the big band tradition -- the singer is just another instrument in the band and doesn't really stand out. It's straighter than most of my albums. It's not really a pop album, I don't think. It's really a big band record.

B&N.com: When you were studying the craft of songwriting in your formative years, were some of these songs models for you in any way?

CS: Not so much. The models for me were more the folk-rock singers of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

B&N.com: It's music a lot of people your age were running away from at that time.

CS: That's right. It was somewhat disdained and thought of as their parents' music. For me, it was definitely my parents' music, but it was so much ingrained in me that singing it always felt like falling off a log. I don't feel jive when I'm doing it.

B&N.com: Looking analytically at your songs, where do you think they stand in relation to this material?

CS: There's definitely some part of them in mine in the richness of the melodies. I think probably I'm quirkier, and my bridges go to more sort of undisciplined places. But in general, my songs are not as singable as the great songwriters of the ‘30s and ‘40s, mainly because I write for myself and therefore take more chances. I'm not writing for another singer, whereas those guys were writing for singers, and therefore they would really have respect for the intervals. I have no respect and therefore can't do them.

B&N.com: Who were some of the singers who influenced you early on? There's an interview on the Web where you mention Odetta, Peggy Lee, Annie Ross, then Judy Collins.

CS: Judy Collins, yes. Joan Baez. Joni Mitchell. Then I kind of was growing toward Carole King, James Taylor, Randy Newman, Cat Stevens, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Weavers. Then there were all these classical composers and musicians. I'm very much into Poulenc and Debussy. I love their odd swerving. You never know where the next note is going to go. There's nothing definite about it. Of course, I was always into Gershwin. Of all the composers of the ‘30s and ‘40s, I guess Gershwin was the one that stayed with me during my sort of pop phase era, or rock 'n' roll, or folk, or whatever you call it. I was also very into Elvis.

B&N.com: You came up in New York’s Greenwich Village folk milieu. Was it an inspiring environment?

CS: You usually can't tell what's inspiring until you look back on it. But certainly, looking back on it, it was. Those were the days when people played each other's songs in the dressing room. You'd pass around the guitar, and you'd play your new song. Then you would learn a chord from another musician. Some of the musicians in the dressing room were incredible! People like Kris Kristofferson and John Prine and Steve Goodman, and Buffy St. Marie and Phoebe Snow and Buzzy Linhart, and Shel Silverstein and Dave Van Ronk... I could go on and on. But people who weren't even playing the Bitter End would come back into the dressing room, and we would have a very un-self-conscious passing around of the guitar.
I just got a call from Cat Stevens, which was the best surprise I could have had in a long time. I hadn't seen him in 25 years, or spoken to him. He's now Yusef Islam. He was the reason that I performed live in the first place, not with my sister but as a solo artist. I wasn't going to be performing, and then I made my first album with "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" on it, which went slowly up to No. 14 on the charts. The president of Elektra called me and asked me if I would open for Cat Stevens, that Cat Stevens had asked me to open for him at the Troubadour. I said, "No-no, no-no, no-no-no, no-no." He called me back and said, "What would it take to get you to perform, to open for Cat Stevens?" I said, "If Russ Kunkel was playing drums for me." I knew that Russ Kunkel wasn't available, because he was on the road with James Taylor, whose career I was following with a fine-tooth comb because I loved his music so much. I'd only met him once, really briefly. So I knew that was going to stop the ability for Russ Kunkel to play with me, which would get me out of it. But then the next day he called me again and said, "Russ is available; when do your rehearsals start?" I couldn't back out of that. I'd made a commitment. So I rehearsed together with Jimmy Ryan, who was my guitarist, and Paul Glantz, who was a piano player, and we rehearsed six songs, and then we went out to Los Angeles, my first trip ever to L.A. We had one day's rehearsal with Russ Kunkel, and opened the next day for Cat Stevens. And that was that!

July, 2005

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