Carly Simon

Carly Simon is an American singer-songwriter and author whose six-decade career has produced multiple 1970s American singer-songwriter hits and one of the most-celebrated bodies of work in 1970s American singer-songwriter music. She was born Carly Elisabeth Simon on June 25, 1945, in The Bronx, New York City, into the American Simon and Schuster publishing family — her father Richard L. Simon was the co-founder of the Simon & Schuster publishing company. She started performing as half of the Simon Sisters folk duo with her older sister Lucy Simon in the early 1960s.

Her solo career began in 1971 with her self-titled debut album Carly Simon — produced by her then-boyfriend James Taylor's producer Eddie Kramer — which produced the single "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be." Her single came with the November 1972 release of "You're So Vain" — the acerbic ballad that has been continuously cited as one of the American songs of the 1970s.

The identity of the song's male subject — "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you" — has been continuously debated in American popular music for over five decades. Simon has refused to publicly identify the subject, only confirming in 2015 that the second verse referred specifically to actor Warren Beatty. The song reached the Billboard Hot 100 #1 position in January 1973.

She married singer-songwriter James Taylor in November 1972 in a short-notice ceremony, and the couple had two children before their 1983 divorce. Her subsequent albums through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s produced multiple Hot 100 hits including "Nobody Does It Better" (1977, the theme from the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me), "Jesse" (1980), and the "Coming Around Again" (1986). She won the Best Original Song Academy Award in 1989 for "Let the River Run" from Working Girl (1988).

Her name Carly is the English short form of Carolyn or Caroline (from the Old Germanic Karl meaning "free man"). Carly has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.