By Stefanie Syman
Reduce, reuse, recycle. It’s the animating principle of the environmental movement distilled down to its bumper sticker essence. The principle can also have surprising results when applied to music making, particularly if it’s Carly Simon making the music.
When she began working on her latest album, Into White, Simon selected just a few instruments besides her voice and then let serendipity take over. She ended up where she began, recording new, spare, and haunting renditions of songs like Scarborough Fair and Blackbird, songs that defined her own generation. But she didn’t stop her inspired recycling there. She recorded classics from the American songbook like Over the Rainbow—as well as two original compositions.
Carly Simon recently talked to LIME about Into White and how she “lives the change.” Below you’ll find an excerpt of the interview. . .
On her new album, Into White
LIME: You call this a return to your guitar based roots, and the singer/songwriters of your own generation. Are there ideas that you connect to these songs that also inspired you to return to them?





Interests: Living life as an intiatic experience, uniting with like minds and hearts to build a better, cleaner, more peaceful world, listening to the wisdom of the inner voice, communing with the elemental forces of Nature, the arts, media and communications, personal growth and development, the natural healing arts, interesting cuisines, cinema, all that expands the consciousness, betters the Self, and links me with THAT from Which I come.
Inspiration: Whitman, Thoreau, the Tao, deep meditation, spiritually anointed words carried on the human voice and the Cosmic Winds, being with those of like mind and calling.