Thursday, April 08, 2021

Song of the Day: 'Anticipation' by Carly Simon


Sometimes a Song of the Day just lands in your lap.

Yesterday Carly Simon wrote:
Fifty years ago tonight I opened for Cat Stevens at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

"Anticipation" was the lead single single from her 1971 album of the same name and is one of her biggest hits, peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard pop singles chart and at No. 3 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. The song also ranked No. 72 on Billboard's Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1972, and garnered Simon a Grammy Award nomination for Best Pop Female Vocalist.

Simon famously wrote "Anticipation" -- which was later used in a series of Heinz Ketchup commercials in the late '70s among other pop culture moments -- on the guitar in 15 minutes, as she awaited Cat Stevens to pick her up for a date.


In 2018, it was used in a teaser advertisement for the ABC series “The Conners.”


This one featured a young Corey Feldman!


The taste that's worth the wait.


Something tells me those Heinz commercials came about when the tax man came a-calling, as was the case when Carly sang this Beatles classic for a Sun Chips commercial in the 1980s! Her memoir about her friendship with Jackie O was fascinating for a number of reasons, not the least of which when she was extremely blunt about how much money she received as a Simon & Schuster heiress. Because her dad was marginalized after suffering a breakdown and was pushed out of the publishing empire he co-founded, there was much less money than most people would assume. And further complicating matters was that Carly's two older sisters and younger brother eventually pressured her to give up what money she was to inherit because she'd become "rich and famous," the former of which was less so because her stage fright prevented her from ever touring, the main source of income for most singers. Being extremely insecure and not thinking she deserved what success she achieved, Carly willingly signed away her inheritance to her siblings, and seems to have struggled financially ever since -- at least in the ways that people with estates on Martha's Vineyard(!) who are romantically involved with prominent surgeons "struggle" to make ends meet.

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