Creativity Quote by Carly Simon

Carly Simon drops this lineup of names the way musicians trade chord changes: not as trivia, but as a self-portrait in motion. “A big Peggy Lee stage” signals the seduction of cool control - Lee’s smoky restraint, the idea that you can say everything while barely raising your voice. Then “I became Annie Ross” is sharper and more technical: Ross is a musician’s musician, all wit and velocity, a singer who treats language like percussion. That “became” is doing work; Simon isn’t just influenced, she’s trying on identities the way a young artist raids a closet.

Landing on “then Judy Collins” shifts the lighting. Collins carries the earnest, crystalline confessional of the folk revival, the sense that the voice is a moral instrument as much as a sonic one. Simon’s sequence maps a cultural timeline of postwar female vocal personas - lounge sophistication, jazz modernism, then folk sincerity - but it’s also an admission about apprenticeship. Before the famous Carly Simon voice hardens into something instantly recognizable, there’s mimicry, aspiration, and a little self-mythmaking.

The subtext is pleasantly unsentimental: artistry isn’t born fully formed, it’s assembled. By framing it as “stages,” Simon normalizes reinvention and quietly pushes back against the expectation that women in pop arrive as “authentic” packages. Her authenticity, she implies, is cumulative - a collage of women who made distinct ways of sounding like yourself.