Who’s So Vain?

There seems to be a bit of renewed dis­cus­sion about just who Carly Simon’s song is about. Even The New Repub­lic and NPR are in on it.

It is pos­si­ble that You’re So Vain is about a par­tic­u­lar man. It is pos­si­ble that all of the details arise from one indi­vid­ual man. But I doubt it.

It is far more likely that the song is about many men and no man. Some of the details are likely made up from whole cloth, the rest from var­i­ous peo­ple that she knew or heard about. Carly was a beau­ti­ful woman from a bit of wealth who was mak­ing a liv­ing in the music indus­try (the song is on her third album). It is not a stretch to think that she had dated more than one or two vain men

On Simon’s web­site is a com­pi­la­tion of bits of inter­views over the years on the sub­ject. In one she says:

I was at a party and some­body walked in and my friend said to me “Doesn’t he look like he’s just walked on to a yacht?”. So, I thought to myself — hmmm, let me write that in my notebook.

At times she inti­mates that the song is about a com­pi­la­tion of men. At other times she hints it is about one man. She seems to have a good idea of how to keep inter­est up.

Here we are in 2010. Simon has barely been heard from since 1990’s Have You Seen Me Lately. The Wikipedia discog­ra­phy lists eight cd releases since then, but I don’t believe there has been a lot of suc­cess with any of them. Her lat­est release admits as much in its title: Never Been Gone. She wouldn’t have to tell us that if we didn’t think she had been.

Three of those last eight cds were all cov­ers. One was an opera which I guess did so bad that she put a piece of it on the next cd, Let­ters Never Sent, in hopes that the added expo­sure would help.

And sur­prise, sur­prise, Never Been Gone is all cov­ers of her own ear­lier (more suc­cess­ful) material.

And sur­prise, sur­prise, Carly sneaks in a whis­per to get every­one talk­ing about You’re So Vain once again after all these years.

For the record, I had always been a big fan of Carly Simon. But I have not been much excited about her music since 1990.

Oh yeah. This is my 101^st post!

Tagged as: Carly Simon, Music