"You're So Vain" / Carly Simon

Lately it seems every song I get hooked on turns out to be something I've written about before. So I'm thoroughly jazzed to discover that this earworm -- which has been haunting me since I put it on a solar eclipse playlist for April 8th ("you flew your LearJet to Nova Scotia / to see the total eclipse of the sun") -- is fresh territory.

Honestly?

I mean, when it hit the airwaves in November 1972, this song was everywhere. And I know you know it, so don't pretend you don't.

That fall I had just discovered a local "all hits all the time" radio station in Springfield, MA, that I played constantly (no Spotify back then, kids, no computers -- I actually played this on my clock radio, since I didn't even own a car at the time). This rolled up regularly, alongside the Doobie Brothers ("Listen to the Music"), America ("Ventura Highway"), and Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show ("Cover of Rolling Stone," which -- prepare to have your mind blown -- was actually written by Shel Silverstein). And yes, also Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman," so Carly wasn't the only chick putting out feminist manifestos at the time.

Simon had already been on my radar, with her moody, angsty "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," which came out a year and a half earlier, blowing my young mind by questioning the marriage/kids imperative. 

But this song? This was full-on female swagger and sass, with perfect pop instincts. Best of all: It's a riddle for the ages. Because who exactly WAS this egotistic ex she's skewering? Mick Jagger? David Bowie? Warren Beatty? David Cassidy? The one person she has definitively said it wasn't was James Taylor, whom she'd married just before the song came out. Damn -- way to play your cards, Carly.

But all that buzz obscures Carly's classic songwriting chops. She starts in verse one with a skewering real-time shot of the preening male diva -- "You walked into the party / Like you were walking onto a yacht / Your hair strategically dipped below one eye / Your scarf it was apricot." In verse two she widens the shot to Mr. X's jet-setting activities, at the Saratoga racetrack ("where your horse naturally won") and up in Nova Scotia viewing the aforementioned eclipse. How coolly she backs into her devastating remark, "You're where you should be all the time / And when you're not you're with / Some underground spy or the wife of a close friend..."

And then in verse three she makes it personal. "You had me several years ago / When I was quite naive." Has she moved on? Enigmatically, she comes back with "I had some dreams /They were clouds in my coffee / Clouds in my coffee..." Well there's a whole world there to explore.

Funny thing is -- fifty years on, I can still sing every word of this song. Hard-wired, I tell you.