Carly Simon – HuffPost 12.4.09

[Note: This is taken from my interview with Carly Simon in which she discusses her creative process with regards to the song “No Freedom.”]

Carly Simon: Let’s talk about “No Freedom” for a minute because it has a very interesting history, I think. It was a song I wrote on a vacation I was taking with my wonderful, adorable ex-husband…Jim Hart, who is a poet and just a magnificent man. It turned out that we just didn’t have the same lifestyle. I wrote the lyric, “There ain’t no freedom when you’ve got a worrying mind,” and originally it was a reggae beat that I put it to, but by the time I got back to New York, it was just one of those many lyrics that I have that I didn’t do anything with. And then Fall of last year, I found the lyrics. God, I’ve got so many books where I have like four pages filled, you know, and then I’d say, “Eh, let me get another book, maybe I’ll have better luck,” so I’d get another little composition book. (laughs) I found “No Freedom,” and I wondered if David would have any ideas about these lyrics.

David, who was living with us, was in the kitchen, and I went down one morning and said, “See if you like this, see if you can do anything with this.” Right away, David came up with something really, really good. We sang it, and it was really a folk song, a wasn’t-trying-at-all folk song which had a real charm to it. David, Ben and I ended up singing it with just guitar and we didn’t add any harmony to it, and it just seemed like a straight-forward, totally honest song that I’m sure you probably would have really loved. (laughs) But I never got my arms around it, I couldn’t quite sing it.

So one morning, I woke up and thought, “I know…it should be in 2/4 time!” It had to be in that beat, like “Bennie And The Jets.” I said that to Ben and he ran to his house with it–one of the studios is in his house, we have a compound here that has houses. He put a sample of “Bennie And The Jets” into “No Freedom,” and it changed the melody in one case where it had to be in a different key. It really changed the feeling of it, but I loved it, and Ben sang the lead on it. When I tried to sing with him, I was only, at best, a second violinist, and I was an octave above him or I sang harmony, so it really didn’t sound like a Carly Simon song, which it still almost doesn’t. But I happen to love the way Ben’s and my voices sound together.