Art & Creativity Quote by Carly Simon

Carly Simon slips a whole creative philosophy into this offhand breakdown of process: authorship isn’t a throne, it’s a relay race. The casual “sometimes” repeated like a drum hit matters. It refuses the myth of the lone genius and replaces it with something messier and truer to how pop actually gets made - in rooms, in relationships, in fragments passed back and forth until they click.

The mention of “my boyfriend” lands with extra charge given Simon’s era, when women in music were routinely framed as voices rather than architects. She’s not asking permission to be taken seriously; she’s quietly normalizing her authority as a composer. At the same time, she doesn’t posture as self-sufficient. The line admits collaboration without surrendering agency: sometimes he brings words, sometimes she begins “from scratch.” The syntax keeps her at the center of the decision-making, even when the materials come from someone else.

Then she swerves to “a local poem,” widening the lens beyond the romance narrative and the industry pipeline. That phrase signals a kind of cultural scavenging - not in the exploitative sense, but in the folk tradition of borrowing, adapting, translating community language into song. It’s also a subtle argument about ownership: songs can be born from intimacy, solitude, or place, and the melody becomes the thread that stitches those sources into something performable.

Underneath it all is a rejection of purity tests. Simon positions songwriting as craft, not confession: the goal isn’t to prove authenticity, but to make something that carries.