Carly Simon in a Retrospective Mood: The Status Quo Is Not Okay With Me

By JESSIE ROYCE HILL

Carly Simon has been upstairs in her studio writing lyrics to one of hundreds of new songs she has begun, and she's just emerged with a fresh one.

It begins, "Why didn't I show up for the birth of my baby?"

It is not, the singer stresses, about her actual children, but a metaphor for failing to be present, for feeling awkward during life's big moments when she wanted to be free to experience them.

"It's about sleeping through events in my life," she says. "I want to line up my attributes and my deficits and just be okay with myself now, be natural."

The 58-year-old singer laughs, as she does often in offering a searing self-analysis.

"I'm all right-brain today," she says, stretching out on the divan in the library of her compound in the woods of West Tisbury. Barefoot in black capri tights and a black leotard top, she looks sleekly long and feline.

Like a cat, she's finicky. She doesn't like to be cornered or let any one period of her life describe her entirely.

"I'm bored with phases," she says. "When people say that was then, this is now, this is my new phase where everything's happy and clear, I don't believe them. I'm having an identity crisis now, just like I was 20 years ago. I still feel lost at sea. I'm invited to parties but I don't know how to go."

Then she sings the last sentence, finding it works better as a melody. Her creamy alto is often described as sexy and seductive. By singing, she seems to find confidence, like a shy writer emboldened by her pen. When she sings, she smiles. The pleasure she derives from song is contagious, and over the past three decades it has captivated legions of fans.

Spurred by the new release of Reflections, a 20-track CD of greatest hits, Ms. Simon sat down with the Gazette to talk about her life, her time and the Vineyard. The faint buzz of landscapers preparing the gardens for summer activity provided a seasonal soundtrack.

"The peonies come out for summer and my endorphins rise just looking at them," she says. "I came here, to a cabin in the woods with James Taylor in 1971 and I never left."

The cabin has grown considerably in scale since then, with guest houses and abodes for each of her grown children, Ben and Sally Taylor. But Ms. Simon's sense of the land, and the tranquility she derives from her country solitude, have been constants.

Still, for many years, Ms. Simon was the life of the party, the friendliest girl on the circuit. "I had dates for breakfast, lunch, dinner and after-dinner. I was entertaining or being entertained all the time," she says.

Now she spends much of her time alone on these grounds, in her "fairy tale haze," as she jokingly calls it. "There are days when it's just me, my donkey, my cat, my dog and my sheep." She maintains ties to friends and her industry by telephone. But in the last few years since moving back to the Island to live full-time during her recovery from breast cancer, Ms. Simon has grown accustomed to a more solitary rhythm.

It started when she was working on The Bedroom Tapes, her last studio album, released in 2000. Ms. Simon would head upstairs to her studio, next to her bedroom, and write and record songs from nine at night until dawn. She likes the quiet night.

"It wasn't work, really," she says. "Memorizing the order of Egyptian kings, that's work. Writing music is fun.

After she completed her album she went right into her first project with Walt Disney Studios, recording the voices for Piglet's Big Movie; she installed a direct link to the Disney Studios from her second floor. She is currently at work on Pooh's Heffalump Movie, and the film Little Black Book, coming out later this year, prominently features her songs.

"I need to be alone with my machines to compose, so I got used to it," she says of her present routine. "But I'm not the little old lady on the hill. There are times when every bed and couch and chair in my house is taken. I think of myself as part of the community here."

Lately, the singer, known for her philanthropic efforts on the Island, has scaled back to focus on inner territory: the life of the mind.

"I've become much more cerebral," she says. "I used to be a hedonist, and now I have books on my mind. If I ever leave music, it'll be to study the brain. How do minds work?"

Ms. Simon is an avid reader of science and philosophy. She loves Jane Brody and the Science Times section of The New York Times. She mines the books on her library shelves for clues about the fragile links between genius and accident.

"It's like The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat, about the discovery of penicillin," she explains. "Out of these strange accidents come huge discoveries. A certain purple bleeds into red and all of a sudden you have something unexpected."

Recently she has read Descarte's Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio R. Damasio; Speak, Memory, a memoir by Vladimir Nabokov; and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.