Creativity Quote by Carly Simon

There’s a sly humility baked into Carly Simon’s admission, the kind that lands because it refuses the usual myth of the born genius effortlessly channeling truth. “Standards” aren’t just old songs; they’re cultural infrastructure: melodies engineered for breath, phrasing, and the lived-in architecture of a voice. By saying she leaned on them because her own writing was “not as easy to sing,” Simon punctures the romantic idea that songwriting automatically fits its author like a glove. Craft, she implies, is muscle and measurement, not simply confession.

The subtext is even sharper: her self-written songs were probably harder because they were more personal, more idiosyncratic, less obedient to the ergonomic rules that make a tune glide. Standards come with a map - familiar chord changes, predictable arcs, a kind of vocal handrail. Writing for yourself means inventing the terrain, then having to walk it live, night after night, with no guarantee your body will cooperate. That’s a quiet acknowledgement of the physicality of performance, and of how merciless a melody can be when it sits in the “wrong” part of your range or demands emotional intensity without a place to hide.

Context matters, too. Simon emerged in an era when singer-songwriters were prized for authenticity, for the sense that the record was the diary. Her line gently resists that pressure: sometimes the most “authentic” thing is choosing material that serves the voice, not the ego. It’s also a musician’s way of honoring the tradition while admitting the grind behind making originality singable.