When Carly Simon released her debut single in the spring of 1971, pop radio wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
“That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” was a brooding ballad that dared to ask a question few women in pop music were saying out loud: Was traditional marriage a trap? The song spoke directly to women who looked critically upon the marriages of their parents and friends and wanted something different for themselves.
Yet behind the song’s feminine voice was a man. Simon composed the haunting, melancholy melody, and its lyrics were penned by her close male friend, journalist and screenwriter Jacob Brackman, according to Top 40 Weekly.
The song’s origins were even more surprising. She told Billboard, “For the previous two years, I was writing material, still not knowing if I was going to be accepted by a record company. I did [the music for] a television show for NBC called Who Killed Lake Erie, and for that I wrote the melody that turned into ‘That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be.’”
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She continued, “In the summer of ’69, I met [future songwriting collaborator] Jake Brackman up at Indian Hill Camp. We were both counselors: he was the literature counselor, and I was the music counselor. He wrote the words to ‘That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be’— or most of the verses — and I loved them right away.”
Simon concluded, “He did such a great job, and we honed it, and then that’s the song that ended up being the single, because it was so unusual. People said that they’d never heard a song like that. It was more of an art song than anything else.”
She later told The Independent, “The song really tells it like it is. When I first wrote it I thought it was an unusual thing for people to break up, and now all my friends are divorced.”
“That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” was the breakout single of Simon’s self-titled first LP. The song peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1971, and earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1972. That same year, Simon won Best New Artist.
Related: In 1972, Carly Simon Landed Her Signature No. 1 Hit—Thanks to Uncredited Vocals From Rock Royalty