Learning to speak with rhythm: How Carly Simon turned her stutter into singer-songwriter genius
Carly Simon was destined to be a writer, in some capacity.
Her father, Richard L Simon, was the co-founder of the eponymous Simon & Schuster publishing house, as well as a classical pianist with an affinity for Chopin and Beethoven. It is no wonder, then, that his daughter would turn to songwriting as her chosen art form, as she was raised to be musically inclined, with lessons beginning as a child.
“Growing up, I assumed every family in the world sang, harmonised and played the piano together,” she wrote in her memoir, 2015’s Boys in the Trees, explaining that even her neighbours in her family’s Greenwich Village townhouse could be heard playing music, but Simon’s path to singer-songwriter was a much more layered one.
She developed a severe stutter from about the age of six, which, in her words, made for “tremendous difficulty in saying anything”. She told Brain and Life in 2009, “It was agonising when I was asked questions at school and knew the answer, but couldn’t say anything because I was scared to distort my face and voice.”
She and her family even sought treatment from a psychiatrist, which proved unsuccessful, and as she recounts in Boys in the Trees, Simon developed a language of her own to utilise in her diary entries, to deal with her stutter at school. The word “famult”, for instance, was another word for “stutter”, she created to mask the emotions that came with dealing with her impediment from such a young age.
“What mattered only was that hiding was now my game,” she wrote, “discovery my shame”.
Soon, it was her mother, Andrea, who showed her daughter a coping mechanism that would effectively change her life. “My mother taught me how to speak with rhythm, which is what I tell a lot of the stutterers that I come into contact with now,” Simon revealed to Brain and Life.
Adding, “Because everyone in the family knew that it was very hard for me to speak but very easy to sing, we began to sing around the house all the time, telling each other to go to bed, or get up, or come to dinner.”
At her mother’s encouragement, Simon began tapping a beat on her leg when she began to stutter, then singing along with whichever thoughts came to mind. “Naturally, at school or at a friend’s house or inside a department store, I couldn’t sing what I wanted to say, but did that really matter?” she wrote in her memoir, adding:
“A melody now existed inside my head. It helped me… I’d just been handed a crucial new piece of ammunition.”
This method of singing her thoughts saved Simon from some of her mental stress, though she did eventually turn to songwriting, too, as a dual means of communicating when she felt “strangulated” trying to speak and writing songs came naturally, when she realised she could sing without stuttering. Simultaneously, Simon also struggled with dyslexia, but she believed that the learning disability helped her songwriting, rather than hindering it.
It was this positive outlook that guided her through her first two albums, her eponymous 1971 debut and that year’s Anticipation. The title track for Anticipation, written for Yusuf/Cat Stevens, “came down from the universe into my head and then out my mouth, so it bypassed the mind,” she explained to WBUR, noting how her dyslexia directly impacted the ways that her music came to fruition.
“I really have to love a song in order to finish writing it,” she outlined her songwriting methods to Rock Magazine, ahead of Anticipation’s release, adding, “If I don’t love it, I just discard it, and use sections of it in a new song, or just change it around so much until I do love it. If I only like a song, then it isn’t good enough to finish.”
This fragmented approach guided much of Simon’s early songwriting, informed by writing sessions as a summer camp counsellor with her collaborator, Jacob Brackman, to continuing her own writing as a solitary act, growing from finding solace in her diary entries as a child while struggling to overcome her stutter, to debuting as a singer in the 1960s. As her songwriting abilities grew, her pieced-together methods of crafting a song, made from “hundreds of little scratchings on pieces of paper”, proved fruitful.
Emerging as a solo artist with the sensation of her single ‘That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be’, co-written with Brackman, Simon’s voice soared in a way that perhaps felt surprising, for a young woman who, for so long, struggled to communicate. But, at the same time, singing had been a constant for Simon since childhood; it was only a matter of time until this particular form of communication would prevail.
