Throughout the 1970s, Carly Simon was among the leading lights of the Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter movement. She ascended to the top of the charts with singles that yoked epigrammatic lyrics to catchy melodies and smooth production. On songs like her signature hit, “You’re So Vain,” her eye for lyrical detail and the humor in her vocal performance made her an icon for heartbroken fans everywhere, giving them the words they wish they could have said themselves.
After she married James Taylor in 1972, Simon turned to domestic life as a source of inspiration. Her 1974 album Hotcakes—in which she was photographed pregnant for the cover—was a concept album about marriage and motherhood, and would later appear on the Grammy-winning children’s compilation In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record as both a solo artist and as the composer of the Doobie Brothers’ contribution “Wynken, Blynken & Nod”. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Simon composed the music for Heartburn, Postcards from the Edge, and This Is My Life, three films that explored the vagaries of marriage and motherhood.
A mechanized drumbeat fades in over the opening shot of Heartburn, as Rachel (Meryl Streep) and Mark (Jack Nicholson) bump into one another. As their gazes shift from suspicion to allure, an insistent melody bubbles up on an electric piano, only to melt into the opening notes of Wagner’s “Wedding March” as the pair take their seats with their respective friend groups. The instruments are recorded with a heavy hand on the reverb, seemingly to make the drum machine sound like a brushed snare, but the attempts at treating it like an acoustic instrument just make it sound more like a drum machine. This is an apt metaphor for the relationship at the center of Heartburn, in which two people who are wrong for one another go through the motions of a marriage.
The inspiration for Heartburn was as symbiotic as Nichols’ use of the song “Coming Around Again”. According to Carly Simon’s website, screenwriter Nora Ephron wrote the script while listening to Simon’s 1985 album Spoiled Girl—which sold so poorly that Simon was dropped from her label after its release—and the song “The Wives Are in Connecticut”, with its matter-of-fact depiction of marital infidelities, was a particular inspiration on the Heartburn script. When Nichols died in 2014, Simon said in a statement to Billboard that Nichols “gave me the biggest break by asking me to score the movie Heartburn and after that… Postcards From the Edge.”
Simon struck up a particular affinity with Nora Ephron, whose career as a journalist and humorist in the 1970s paralleled Simon’s time on the pop charts. While Simon has a sole writing credit on “Coming Around Again”, her working relationship with Ephron was highly collaborative. “She would get inside of the head of the character and do some channeling and I would add some rhythm and this and that,” Simon told Showbiz 411 after Ephron’s death in 2012. “She had a gift for the specific, and could hone in on a character by giving me (in this case the songwriter) a word like ‘souffle’ and I added the verb ‘burn’ as in ‘burn the souffle’ and it says a whole lot more than what I could have cooked up alone for Meryl’s character to be feeling through song.”
The score for Heartburn sounds like it was pulled from the stems of “Coming Around Again”; a drum machine here, a bassline there, a piano wistfully playing a melody over there. Nichols and editor Sam O’Steen allow scenes to play out in long, wide-angled takes and refrain from using music to tell the audience what they’re feeling so we can take in how wrong Mark and Rachel are for one another. In the scenes where Nichols does use music—as in the moment when the couple have their first kiss under a theatre marquee—it feels like he’s emphasizing images from the couple’s relationship he wants us to remember.
“Coming Around Again” is finally played in full about halfway through the film, when Rachel learns of Mark’s infidelities while she’s heavily pregnant with her second child. Nichols’ careful use of the song’s parts makes it sound more familiar, and after thinking back on the times we’ve heard the score, we get a greater perspective not only on how Mark and Rachel are hurting one another, but on the wider effects of their tumultuous relationship. He fades the song out at the end of the first chorus and plays it in full over the closing scene in which Rachel decides to leave Mark. Hearing the repeated phrase “I believe in love” at the end of the song comes off as less optimistic than when you hear it out of context, and more like something Rachel would say through gritted teeth as she signs her divorce papers.
Heartburn was a modest success on its 1986 release, and Simon’s album Coming Around Again received two Grammy nominations. Simon would collaborate with Nichols on his next two films. Her soaring anthem “Let the River Run”, which played over the opening credits of Working Girl, netted an Oscar win for Best Original Song, and she also scored Nichols’ following feature, Postcards from the Edge.
Like Heartburn, Postcards depicts a troubled mother/daughter relationship between two women who have spent their lives involved with the media. Up-and-coming actress Suzanne Vale (Streep, again) has developed a serious drug problem, to the point where she overdoses on the set of her most recent film. After going through rehab, she books a role in a low-budget movie, under the condition that she move in with her mother (Shirley MacLaine), an iconic actress-turned-lush.
Nichols uses so much diegetic music in Postcards from the Edge that Simon’s score seems almost like an afterthought. The cues act as transitions between different facets of Suzanne’s life, and they also ground the film in its late 1980s milieu. Simon’s airy production and juxtaposition of jittery guitar riffs against precise drum lines was in conversation with what musician Mike Pace has termed “Spago Rock”. Though she didn’t write the closing-credits song for Postcards, Simon would use some of the musical ideas from the film score as the basis for songs on her next album, Have You Seen Me Lately.
By the end of the 1980s, Rob Reiner, Herbert Ross, and, yes, Mike Nichols had directed Ephron’s scripts, and she was ready to make her own film. Columbia Pictures head Dawn Steel had suggested Meg Wolitzer’s novel This Is Your Life, the story of a single mom who becomes a standup comedian, as a good fit for Ephron’s sensibility, and Ephron and her sister Delia adapted the novel into a feature film.
When This Is My Life went into production, Ephron contacted Simon about scoring the film. Simon recalled to People magazine in 1991 that Ephron told her “(i)t’s ‘our story’, about the tricky business of raising children and maintaining a solid career, without the benefit of a live-in father.” Simon’s working relationship with Ephron was as collaborative as it had been on Heartburn—Simon recalls the director “(giving) me lines” for the film’s love theme, “Love of My Life”—she also drew from her relationship with her kids for inspiration for the songs she wrote for the picture.
The ten songs Simon wrote for This Is My Life serve as a kind of Greek chorus for the film, anticipating and putting words to the emotions of the protagonists. This works best in scenes like an early-film montage in which Dottie (Julie Kavner) performs at a series of open mics. Simon’s wavering vocals echo the nervousness Dottie experiences as she judges whether her jokes are connecting with the audience, and the rolling snare drum that’s slightly behind the beat mimics the way Dottie’s punchlines don’t quite land with her audiences.
This Is My Life allowed Simon to grow in another way. In her previous film scores, the music she’d written was consistent with what you’d hear on a 1980s Carly Simon album. Ephron’s work frequently had throwback elements, and in This Is My Life she balanced her irreverent sense of humor and awareness of contemporary relationships with a 1940s visual aesthetic in the set design and in Dottie’s costumes. Simon had dabbled in pre-rock and roll pop songwriting (as with “Someone Waits for You”, the title song from Swing Shift), and the song score for This Is My Life gave her the opportunity to write more in this style. The crisp production, rolling percussion, and substitution of banjolele in place of guitar complemented Simon’s languid melodies and vocals, deftly balancing the jazz age with the early 1990s.
With her recent induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Carly Simon has received the credit she deserves as one of the leading lights of the singer/songwriter era. Her skill at telling stories through music extended effectively into film, and she was able to work with some of cinema’s leading lights to add her insights to their stories of marriage and motherhood. As Simon enters into the twilight of her career, her work in film deserves a second look. 
