Song Lyric of the Day (Carly Simon, on “Love’s Debris”)

“You say we can keep our love alive
Babe, all I know is what I see
The couples cling and claw
And drown in love's debris.”—“That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” lyrics by Jacob Brackman, music by Carly Simon, from the Carly Simon LP (1971)

The above credits indicate that the title of this post is, in a way, misleading. Technically, it’s lyricist Jacob Brackman who came up with these searing verses. But Carly Simon composed the music and delivered the angst-ridden vocals. And, because she poured her heart out to friend Brackman, I would say that he is merely channeling her voice.

Forty years ago this month, Simon’s self-styled debut album was released by the up-and-coming label Elektra, with “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” the single that launched her long career. The song was a most unlikely success, removed alike from the protest songs that had dominated the charts until the past year or so, as well as the cheerful pop (the Partridge Family!) increasingly taking over. It chronicled not a foreign war zone, but brooding domestic warfare, where the wounds weren’t so obvious.

In a prior post, I discussed Simon’s father, Richard Simon--exiled from the publishing house he founded, stricken with heart disease, too depressed to protest the affair his wife was conducting in their own home with a younger man hired as companion for her pre-adolescent son. His plight was unforgettably evoked, a decade after his death, in what I consider the most powerful song of his daughter’s career:

“My father sits at night with no lights on
His cigarette glows in the dark.
The living room is still;
I walk by, no remark.”

Despite its autobiographical roots, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” seems anomalous amid all the rest of Simon’s work. The dominant themes of that, remember, are desire (“Anticipation,” “Give Me All Night”) and loss (“Coming Around Again,” the entire Torch LP). But the single flew into what critic Robert Christgau, in an otherwise condescending summation of her early career, termed “pop music’s wedding-bell clichés.” In its dread of intimacy’s restrictions on freedom, it sounds more like the work of Simon’s folk-rock contemporary, Joni Mitchell.

For all its commercial success that arrived after months of careful radio promotion by advocates (such as longtime family friend and then-WNEW-FM deejay Jonathan Schwartz), the song was something of a cause celebre in the feminist community. Many voiced their deep dismay over the ending, in which the narrator, after repeating her lover’s urging to “raise a family of our own, you and me,” surrenders: “We’ll marry.” Is that all that women existed for, they asked?

They missed the point, a common problem with those viewing art stemming from a persona that may or may not be the author‘s--or, for that matter, stemming from reality. She might be in a different time and place, but Simon’s narrator, in her isolation and emotional brittleness, shares something in common with Carol Kennicott, the would-be rebel who yields to the small-town mores she’s desperately opposed in Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel Main Street.

Simon’s vocal makes the capitulation to convention in a dying fall, whose short, wan quality contrasts dramatically with the powerful images and arguments against marriage given free rein earlier. You can’t help feeling that the union of the would-be partners in the song will not end happily--either enduring, as Simon’s parents did, beneath the thinnest of veneers, or openly fracturing, as the singer’s marriage to James Taylor finally did in the early 1980s.