MONDAY

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Ms. Simon's official site
• "I love my early hits. . . . I'm so proud of them and I've reinvented them."
• About "Some Kind of Love"
• Ms. Simon's bio

E-mail a friend

Singer-songwriter and Tavis share stories about how they overcame childhood stuttering. (4:10)
 

Full Interview. (22:30)
 

Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Carly Simon to this program. The legendary singer-songwriter has been an influential and popular force in music since her breakout debut album back in 1971. Along the way she's earned two Grammys, an Oscar and a Golden Globe award. Her first collection of new songs in eight years - it's about time, Carly - nice cover, by the way, very nice cover.

First album of new songs in eight years out now is called "This Kind of Love." From the new disc, here is some of the recording session for the song "Hold Out Your Heart."

[Clip]

Tavis: I was getting checked by Carly Simon (laughs) about my introduction. Now what were you checking me on just now?

Carly Simon: I was just checking you because I worked on two albums for Walt Disney in the "Winnie the Pooh" area, and they were all original songs, too. It's just that they weren't - it wasn't really promoted as a Carly Simon album, so.

Tavis: Okay. So how should I say this, then?

Simon: Oh, any way you want, Tavis. (Laughter)

Tavis: No, not any way I want, but just - I said it the way I wanted to say it, and you checked me on it.

Simon: Say it's the first specific album of original songs that weren't about -

Tavis: Winnie the Pooh.

Simon: - Walt Disney characters, yeah.

Tavis: Okay. (Laughter) All right.

Simon: Yeah.

Tavis: (Laughs) I would expect nothing less from the daughter of the founder of Simon & Schuster. You got to get your facts right, Tavis. All right, can we go now?

Simon: We can go.

Tavis: All right. (Laughs) Congratulations.

Simon: Thanks so much.

Tavis: And I stand by my earlier statement: it's a very nice cover. Can I say that?

Simon: It's a nice cover.

Tavis: Put that back up, Jonathan. Can I say it's a nice cover?

Simon: But you know what? Notice here that this is Mickey Mouse on the belt.

Tavis: Oh. You got to get - well, they couldn't see that at home anyway, but you're right. I see the ears now.

Simon: I have a very special relationship with Mickey.

Tavis: What's that about?

Simon: Walking into a store on Madison Avenue in about 1974 and seeing the belt and just knowing that I would have a long relationship with it.

Tavis: I just didn't see Mickey's ears are wrapped around your waist. Now I see it. (Laughter) I see it now. Speaking of things that you have drawn to you, this album, if it's about anything, is really about family. I want to make sure I got this right. I thought I read the credits correctly. One song written by your daughter, one song written by your son, and two songs performed by you about your children.

Simon: Perfect, that's exactly right.

Tavis: Why so much - I love it, but why so much family on this project?

Simon: Well, family, I've never - I don't think I've ever not written about my family from the days when Ben was six months and he was just a very noisy, crying baby, and I named him Tranquillo as a nickname, thinking that I would imbue him with those characteristics.

And he cried all the harder, and of course I was - I always picked him up whenever he cried, and so the - and then Sally sang with me on the song "Jesse" when she was about 10, and both kids sang with me on my VH1 special that I did for Martha's Vineyard. My kids have always been a part of my performing life. And so it's not that much of a surprise to me.

When kids turned into their twenties and thirties, you don't care about them any less. It's just they're different - there's a different kind of problem that happens. You worry about them. For instance, there's one song called "Hold Out Your Heart," the one that you just played, and the lyrics are "Oh my boy, what have you done? Did you go out surfing on a frozen sea? Did you scare the living daylights out of me?"

It was actually one cold February when he came to New York with a friend of his who he really wanted to impress, he was a karate instructor or something, and he said to me, "Mom, I'm going to Jones Beach to go surfing." I said, "No, you're not." And he said, "Oh, yes I am." He disappeared through the back door of our apartment and he went on the subway and I didn't hear from him again until he got back.

And so what was I supposed to expect? I couldn't go all over Jones Beach and try to look for these characters out at sea on a frozen sea. And then my daughter, there'd been a recent set of problems with my daughter that really makes it very, very difficult to talk to her about them, because there's a kind of a vacuum of silence, a kind of an impenetrable wall that we can't seem to blast through. And so I wrote about that in the second verse.

And then in "They Just Care That You're There," the other song that's about them, it's about how children really don't - they don't care whether you brush your hair, they just care that you're there. They don't care if you stay upstairs, they just care that you're there. They don't know that you're all you've ever wanted to be, or if life has answered your prayers - they just want you to be there.

And so that's more about, well, they just want you to be there, really, at all stages of their lives, even though they don't know it. At times they really rebel against you; they just act as if they don't need you, as if they don't even love you anymore. Ben told me once when I thought I found a little bit of a troublesome weed on him, I pointed out, "Ben, did I see that troublesome weed that you were smoking with your friend?" This is when he was about 13.

And he said to me, "Mom, I've been meaning to talk to you about this, but I think that you may be developing Alzheimer's." (Laughter) And they just get to you from every - they just don't give you a break, but they want you to be there. And now they're adults and they're going through their young adulthood and their careers and their problems with their relationships, and they're still so close to me, and they still are looking for signs from me.

They look to me as a role model. They don't always agree with me. But they watch me very carefully, and Ben has always said to me, "Mom, it's not what you say to me about what I should do, it's about what you do that I watch very carefully."

Tavis: I wonder if - and I want to go back to your childhood and how you found your way into music in a few minutes here, but since we're talking about your children, when your mother is Carly Simon and your father is James Taylor, is there any other choice in the world but music? Are you at all - it's not just that they have been with you throughout your musical journey, but I'm wondering whether or not there's even a choice when James Taylor and Carly Simon are your parents.

Simon: Well, I'm sure that there is a choice. Fighting DNA is I'm sure a difficult thing. if it comes by - if you come by it so naturally as to have it possibly in your throat and your larynx and in the way your skull is shaped to produce a certain sound, and you've also been hearing it from the mouths of your mother and father in the forms of nursery rhymes from that to the radio that's on to the records, to the early Stevie Wonder that we played for them to the - just all the songs that they loved from our collections as they grew up around a house where music was constantly being composed.

It would have been odd for them to have gone off to become lawyers. It wouldn't have been odd, for instance, if Sally had become an anthropologist. She's very interested. There are other interests, obviously, that both of them have, but they're both intensely creative and intellectual, too, so they have both the left and the right-hand sides of their brains very well-working.

Tavis: Those are your kids. Let me go back now to your childhood. I mentioned earlier in this conversation, and I think most of us know that you're the daughter of one of the founders of Simon & Schuster, the publishing giant. How does one - there are really two questions that I've been fascinated to ask you. In no particular order, how does one grow up with that kind of privilege and tap into the humanity of other people, number one.

And why did that journey for you lead you to music as opposed to publishing or something else?

Simon: Well, there were books that were everywhere in my parents' house. They were just on the floors, manuscripts -

Tavis: Kind of like music for your kids.

Simon: - piled up. There were books on every - there were too many books, so that you became sort of - I lived in an ocean of books, which made them too available. So I didn't really - I really didn't want to read all that much, and didn't, except for my homework assignments, which were still - they were annoying to the max. Those summer reading lists, oh, God. (Laughter) And I didn't really pay much attention when Einstein came over for lunch.

I didn't know, really, who he was. There were all different kinds of people who were a part of my parents' social and business life. A lot of musicians - Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers, and Arthur Schwartz, my parents' best friend, and George Gershwin performed "Porgy & Bess" for my parents before he performed it for anyone else, and asked my mother to sing "Summertime." (Laughter) This was before I was born. But this was the group that they traveled in.

Tavis: Hung out with, yeah.

Simon: Yeah. And because my father was a publisher and because he got so many interesting people to write books, he went to them. Very often, people will come to a publisher to find out if a publisher is interested in publishing their work, but also publishers seek out authors. And so it was an exciting time which I just came a little too early for, which happened just a little bit before I was able to really appreciate it.

On the other hand, there was my mother, who was an endless civil rights worker, and she was very, very devoted to the cause of believe it or not segregating Stamford, Connecticut in 1954. It was still an area - where we had a home. It was still not a comfortable place for Black Americans to live, and it was kind of tidily brushed under the carpet.

But my mother read a little blurb in the "Stamford Advocate" that Jackie Robinson was trying to move to Stamford, Connecticut with his wife Rachel and his three kids, and was apparently turned down from the piece of property on Cascade Avenue. And she got in touch, I don't know how, with Rachel Robinson, and she called Rachel and she said, "Let's just meet on the Merritt Parkway," and I'll be driving a blah, blah, blah, and you'll be driving a blah, blah, we'll get off at King Street, just wait for me there.

And they met at King Street on the Merritt Parkway and my mother drove Rachel into Stamford, Connecticut, and there she was, in the flesh, the beautiful Rachel Robinson, and my mother took her around to various real estate agents. And they kind of said (stammers), and said, "We'd like to see that piece of property on Cascade Avenue."

And so with whatever misgivings or embarrassment the real estate agents had, they took them over to see the property and then my mother and father went to the community leaders, to the rabbis and the priests and the ministers and the school people and the selectmen, etc., etc., and said, "This is a very embarrassing situation that we've come up to. We're in 1952 and we can't get a piece of property easily for Jackie Robinson and his wife and family to live in."

And so little by little it was worn down and they bought the piece of property on Cascade Avenue. And in the two years that they were building it, they lived with us, and so I got to drive to Ebbets Field with Jackie Robinson in all the home games, or as many as I was allowed to go to (laughter), and when I was eight. And I had a little Dodgers uniform that was made for me.

And that was probably one of the most - oh, and Jackie just taught me so many of the sports that I knew. Jackie was a tennis player, I don't know how many people knew that, but he was the most amazing tennis player, and he taught me how to play tennis.

And he and my Uncle Peter, who is my mother's brother, were the single most - they made such a solid impression upon me, and there was sports going on in my house all the time. Sports and music.

Tavis: And books.

Simon: There was just - and books.

Tavis: Lot of books.

Simon: There was tons of life, it was really exciting. And at the same time, this spirit that my mother had to have all of these civil rights meetings and protests on our lawn, and I sang "Happy Birthday" to Martin Luther King. I know, you can't say anything after that.

Tavis: No, I'm - (laughter) I can't say nothing, period, about this whole conversation. I'm just - Jackie Robinson - wow. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Dr. King. This is - how does all of this, over the course of your career, when you actually start putting pen to paper and start writing lyrics, how did these experiences impact your writing? How do they impact your humanity? How do they impact your substance and your style as an artist?

I take it if all this stuff is being poured into you, it's got to come out some sort of way.

Simon: Yes, by osmosis, certainly all the thoughts, the dinner table discussions, the presence of these extraordinary people, their energy. But then the reason that I actually started to write songs was far afield. I was a freshman in college, and I was taking Italian. And I had been born or - no, I hadn't been born with a stutter, but I developed a stutter, a very serious stutter, at about the age of six, and had tremendous difficulty in saying anything.

And it was agonizing for me to answer questions at school when they were asked and I knew the answer, I knew it was 1868, but I couldn't say anything because I was scared to say (stammers) and just distort my face and distort my voice and it was a harrowing experience, which it's another story and we won't have time for that.

But when I got to college I was taking Italian. The only way that I could remember the Italian poetry was to set it to music. Now this had come after my mother had told me, had taught me how to speak with rhythm, which is what I tell a lot of the stutterers that I come into contact with now, and it started with my leg. I would be at the dining room table and I would say - I would want to say, "Please pass me the water," but I wouldn't be able to say it.

So I would try to say (stammers). And as soon as my mother said, "Just tap your thigh and add the please - please pass the water. Please pass the water right now, yeah. Please pass the water." And there was a little bit of syncopation added to it, which was just naturally genetic, possibility, and I just learned to talk with a very bizarre sense of rhythm that my teachers could never quite figure out. (Laughter)

But so these things together, which is one of the ways I got through my stammering in the rest of high school, by the time I went to college I was adding melody to these Italian poems and adding my almost jazz-like rhythm to them. So it'd be, (singing in Italian). (Laughter)

Tavis: I'm just laughing on the inside, because as a child I had a stuttering problem as well. And I ain't sold no records yet. (Laughter) I'm like, if I'd been at your dinner table with your mama and learned - and I'm Black, I got rhythm. I should have sold a record somewhere along the way. Golly.

Simon: That's fascinating.

Tavis: It is fascinating, yeah.

Simon: How did you get over your stammer?

Tavis: It's funny you should mention this, or ask this, because as a child, at the age of 12 or 13, I'm in Indiana, an all-White community. Long story short, I end up discovering this guy named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who's long since been dead, but he really helped bring me back to life because I got over my stuttering problem by listening to all of his records.

There was a guy who went to my church who bequeathed to me, gave to me as a gift, a lot of the recordings of Dr. King that Barry Gordy from Motown had recorded. And so there was a collection of King LPs, and it was listening to those King LPs and learning how to emulate Dr. King's cadence, which was slow and deliberate and methodical.

It was listening to King on the living room floor of the trailer that I grew up in that I learned how to slow down. And it wasn't just a stutter, but it was a stutter and talking fast, which I still do. But it was the combination of two that was causing me a problem. So listening to King and getting into his cadence, getting into his rhythm, into his style helped, and little by little, I got better at it.

Simon: Fascinating.

Tavis: I'm just laughing, because you're talking about King and that's how I stopped stuttering - or at least not stopped, but got better at it. Enough to do a talk show every night, I guess, on PBS. But it's an amazing story.

When I say 1971 and I say Carly Simon and I say Carole King and I say Joni Mitchell, which everybody's talking about now, thanks to this book, you think what?

Simon: Well, I think of that era as being - God, it's funny, people assume, they assume that you're thinking that you're breaking out. Well, I was thinking about the bedroom on the fourth floor in my house on Primrose Hill across the street from the other house on Regents Park Road, and how I could keep the door that said, "Robert Schli" (sp) from opening at night and the ghost coming out and attacking me. Other things were preoccupying me.

Tavis: Yeah, exactly.

Simon: Yes, I was making a record, but I was also living a life. And I was meeting new people, I was going to the studio every day, I had fallen in love with Cat Stevens' music, I was listening a lot to that. He actually recorded some of my album with me. He was the background singer on a lot of the songs of "Anticipation."

But I was just living my life. I wasn't thinking of breaking out at all. If anything, I was thinking of trying to get my voice, because my voice for years had been Odetta, and I just tried to copy Odetta, just doing her style all the time, and this very deep Carly came out of me through Odetta, and it was really interesting to see that.

And then I sort of became Joan Baez for a little while, and then I became Joni Mitchell. I got a guitar and I did (makes noise). Just kind of little high trills and strange jazz things, great. And then I thought I'll be Neil Young. (Singing) Old man, look at my life. And I just became just - having a fairly good sense of imitation.

I just took all of these voices and I put them all together and I was learning, but I wasn't thinking about it. I wasn't doing it with anything in mind. And I would say by my second album, which was the "Anticipation" album -

Tavis: You'd become Carly Simon.

Simon: I felt that my voice was coming out.

Tavis: And the rest, as they say, is history. And thankfully, she found the thumbprint on her throat, and she is now the Carly Simon that we have loved for so many years. The new record by Carly Simon is called "This Kind of Love." If you're mad that I didn't ask Carly this or ask Carly that, blame it on Carly Simon. Her life is so rich and full that I just didn't have enough time to get to all the stuff we could have talked about.

I wasn't going to waste my time asking who "You're So Vain" is about. I think she could go to her grave without (unintelligible) answer that question. (Laughter) Wasn't going to ask that question. But Carly, nice to have you on. Please come back sometime.

Simon: Well, thank you so much for having me.

Tavis: There's so much we didn't get to, you've got to come back again, I mean that.

Simon: Thank you.