Politics & Power Quote by Carly Simon

It reads like an offhand diary line, but it’s also a quiet map of how American cool gets made: not in grand manifestos, in nights out. Carly Simon’s “We went to see all the shows” frames culture as something you consume communally, almost dutifully, the way ambitious young artists do when they’re trying to figure out what the world expects of them and what they might steal back. The casual “all” is doing a lot of work. It signals immersion, saturation, a kind of apprenticeship-by-osmosis.

Then comes the pivot that makes the sentence more than a scrapbook caption: “American musical theater and jazz were very big.” “Big” isn’t a critic’s word; it’s a participant’s. It places Simon inside a moment when these forms weren’t niche “heritage” but living social currency - glamorous, loud, defining what sophistication looked like. The phrase also hints at proximity to power. Musical theater and jazz are American art forms that learned to survive by mixing commerce and invention; they’re both stagecraft with swagger. For a songwriter, that’s not just entertainment, it’s a toolkit: melody as narrative, voice as character, rhythm as attitude.

The subtext is that taste is formative and aspirational. Simon isn’t name-dropping a scene so much as admitting where the ambition came from: in the glow of Broadway marquees and jazz clubs, where performance is identity and reinvention is the job. It’s nostalgia with a spine - a reminder that “influence” often looks like showing up, repeatedly, until the culture gets under your skin.