The song Carly Simon wrote while waiting for Cat Stevens to turn up for their date
It’s a shame when an artist’s moment of clear genius on a song supersedes the rest of their career. While die-hard Carly Simon fans will waste no time reminding me why her brilliance runs deeper than ‘You’re So Vain’, it’s hard to argue that the one song doesn’t carry her legacy to stratospheric realms. I mean, even the weakest of music fans can’t help but belt out the chorus when it hits.
It’s the mother of all diss tracks, yes, but it quietly thrust Simon forward as one of music’s most profound songwriters. It was a masterful showcase of female empowerment and the liberation of new-found independence. But while the subject of the track has been famously rumoured over, with Warren Beatty being all but confirmed, it was another name in Hollywood circles that inspired a different hit of Simon’s.
“I invited Cat Stevens over for dinner at my house, and I was already in love with his album, and copying his songs and singing along with him on my reel-to-reel tape machine,” Simon told the Grammy Foundation. “So I was waiting for him to show up at my little apartment on 35th Street, and I was very nervous. He was late, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is really too scary that he’s coming for dinner, what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen.'”
Despite being an established star in her own right, a prospective date with Stevens made Simon surprisingly nervous. But nervousness is an equally raw emotion as betrayal, fear, rage or love, all of which have beautifully sharpened Simon’s discography. And, in the case of her hit song, ‘Anticipation’, it seemed that the very emotion that titles it can be thanked for its conception.
“Then I caught myself not living in the moment, and so I picked up my guitar, and I said okay, I’m just going to keep on writing a song until he arrives,” Simon explained. “So I picked up the guitar, and I imitated him and I started doing Cat Stevens lunges into the air with my notes. And so the whole song was kind of done so immediately because I was afraid of losing the song before he came because I liked it. I liked it from the first verse on. And so I finished it by the time he arrived. I guess he was about 40 minutes late.”
It’s funny how people respond during nervous flutters. Sometimes, a panic-induced silence sets in, while for others, a frantic diatribe of stream-of-consciousness thoughts spews out in desperation to fill an anxious silence.
It’s hard to argue that some form of that latter energy wasn’t present in Simon’s creative session, the only difference being she channelled it into something concise. That jittery sense of anticipation wasn’t focused on tapping the table or staring at the front door; instead, it was moulded into a melody and in doing that, Simon confirmed her songwriting genius. But I’m sure at some dinner party somewhere, there’s a male version of this story where the unpunctuality of Cat Stevens takes credit for the song’s genesis.
