CARLY SIMON COMING AROUND AGAIN WITH THE KIND OF LOVE
The singer, now 62, has a new album out and is even hitting the stage with Taylor again -- not ex-husband James, but their son, Ben (and his sister, Sally, is involved too)
CARLY SIMON isn't the first name you'd expect to find on a list of classic-rock superstars who keep tabs on “ American Idol." “I tune in whenever I get a chance," she says in that signature dusky voice. “How could I not, when this season Brooke White sang 'You're So Vain' and did such a nice job on it, and Carly [Smithson] was named after me?"
But even two recent manifestations of the sincerest form of flattery aren't enough to make a complete “Idol" believer out of the woman who long ago defined female rock-star cool and who helped usher in a new era for female singer-songwriters in which they were no longer simply attractive voices and faces for music largely written and produced by men.
The most powerful music platform in today's world trots singers of both sexes out before a panel of all-seeing, all-knowing judges so that millions of unseen viewers can choose one for career molding by an all-powerful veteran -- and male -- music-industry titan, Clive Davis. In that sense, “Idol" seems the antithesis of the time in the early '70s when Simon, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and their sister artists were achieving greater autonomy in their art.
“There's no question that through 'American Idol' we've gone back a couple of eras into the Berry Gordy/Supremes pulling-the-strings kind of thing," said the jet-setting onetime paramour of Warren Beatty and Kris Kristofferson who later married -- then divorced -- folk-rock star James Taylor. This is the same woman who won a Grammy for best new artist after her conventional-marriage-questioning 1971 ballad “That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" and who went to No. 1 with one of pop music's most hotly gossiped-about celebrity comeuppances ever, the 1973 hit that turned up prominently on celebrity-worshiping “American Idol."
Today, Simon still questions the status quo -- whether musical, social or political. But her main interest, the way it always was even when she was helping alter the outer world, is understanding and expressing her inner world. That can come out in a new album, like “This Kind of Love," which was released in April, or through projects such as “Romulus Hunt," the family opera she wrote in 1993 and which has been revived this year in Florida. And now she's going about it with the help of the two things she prizes most from her days as one of the queens of rock: her children (with Taylor) Ben and Sally.
The singer, now 62, has a new album out and is even hitting the stage with Taylor again -- not ex-husband James, but their son, Ben (and his sister, Sally, is involved too)
CARLY SIMON isn't the first name you'd expect to find on a list of classic-rock superstars who keep tabs on “ American Idol." “I tune in whenever I get a chance," she says in that signature dusky voice. “How could I not, when this season Brooke White sang 'You're So Vain' and did such a nice job on it, and Carly [Smithson] was named after me?"
But even two recent manifestations of the sincerest form of flattery aren't enough to make a complete “Idol" believer out of the woman who long ago defined female rock-star cool and who helped usher in a new era for female singer-songwriters in which they were no longer simply attractive voices and faces for music largely written and produced by men.
The most powerful music platform in today's world trots singers of both sexes out before a panel of all-seeing, all-knowing judges so that millions of unseen viewers can choose one for career molding by an all-powerful veteran -- and male -- music-industry titan, Clive Davis. In that sense, “Idol" seems the antithesis of the time in the early '70s when Simon, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and their sister artists were achieving greater autonomy in their art.
“There's no question that through 'American Idol' we've gone back a couple of eras into the Berry Gordy/Supremes pulling-the-strings kind of thing," said the jet-setting onetime paramour of Warren Beatty and Kris Kristofferson who later married -- then divorced -- folk-rock star James Taylor. This is the same woman who won a Grammy for best new artist after her conventional-marriage-questioning 1971 ballad “That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" and who went to No. 1 with one of pop music's most hotly gossiped-about celebrity comeuppances ever, the 1973 hit that turned up prominently on celebrity-worshiping “American Idol."
Today, Simon still questions the status quo -- whether musical, social or political. But her main interest, the way it always was even when she was helping alter the outer world, is understanding and expressing her inner world. That can come out in a new album, like “This Kind of Love," which was released in April, or through projects such as “Romulus Hunt," the family opera she wrote in 1993 and which has been revived this year in Florida. And now she's going about it with the help of the two things she prizes most from her days as one of the queens of rock: her children (with Taylor) Ben and Sally.
