"That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" -- Carly Simon

Carly [Simon] had had years of talking to therapists about her childhood. Now she shared the stories with Jake [Brackman -- her songwriting partner] and to his fresh ear the rich girl's problems that had been deemed merit less by the reverse snobbish times achieved a universal poignancy. And image stayed with Jake: Richard Simon, in failing health, silent in the dark -- Carly yearning for his attention.

One day, Carly handed Jake a melody she had written months earlier but for which she couldn't come up with lyrics. The melodies opening bars (shifting back and forth between two minor mode sequences with close dissonances) were so tensely poignant that Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau would later, upon hearing them on the car radio, be grabbed by their calculated drama. She had composed the melody as the soundtrack for a proposed TV documentary called "Who Killed Lake Eerie," one of her freelance jobs, but nothing had come of it. And I was stuck she remembers.

By writing songs by herself, it was easiest for her to start with the lyric, not the melody. "So I had that melody for so long that I was blocked." When Jake came over, "She gave it to me with 'La, la, la, la's,'" Jake recalls. Thinking of what Carly had told him about her father Jake wrote:

My father sits at night with no lights on
His cigarette glows in the dark
The living room is still;
I walk by, no remark.
I tiptoe past the master bedroom where
My mother reads her magazines.
I hear her call sweet dreams,
But I forgot how to dream.

Jake used that childhood view of the sadness of marriage as a bridge to skepticism about friends from college being married.

They have their houses
And their lawns

...the larger point was that young women had suddenly stopped seeing marriage as the ultimate event of their early twenties. Two souls huddled against the world, the romantic image that had prevailed... was an archaic position. There was too much in this new world: romance, belonging and ecstasy literally flooded the senses...

"I wrote lyrics for Carly," says Jake, like a playwright writing for an actress.

-- Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller:

 



"That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" 
(Carly Simon, Jacob Brackman)

My father sits at night with no lights on
His cigarette glows in the dark.
The living room is still;
I walk by, no remark.
I tiptoe past the master bedroom where
My mother reads her magazines.
I hear her call sweet dreams,
But I forgot how to dream.

But you say it's time we moved in together
And raised a family of our own, you and me -
Well, that's the way I've always heard it should be:
You want to marry me, we'll marry.

My friends from college they're all married now;
They have their houses and their lawns.
They have their silent noons,
Tearful nights, angry dawns.
Their children hate them for the things they're not;
They hate themselves for what they are-
And yet they drink, they laugh,
Close the wound, hide the scar.

But you say it's time we moved in together
And raised a family of our own, you and me -
Well, that's the way I've always heard it should be:
You want to marry me, we'll marry.

You say we can keep our love alive
Babe - all I know is what I see -
The couples cling and claw
And drown in love's debris.
You say we'll soar like two birds through the clouds,
But soon you'll cage me on your shelf -
I'll never learn to be just me first
By myself.

Well O.K., it's time we moved in together
And raised a family of our own, you and me -
Well, that's the way I've always heard it should be,
You want to marry me, we'll marry,
We'll marry.

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