This is Alec Baldwin and you are listening to Here's the Thing.

We can never know about the things to come.

But we think about them anyway.

And I wonder if I'm really with you now.

Or just chasing after some fun or pain.

And dissipation.

And dissipation is making me wait.

It's hard, if not impossible, to imagine the 1970s without musician Carly Simon.

She gained near instant fame after opening for Cat Stevens at LA's Trubidor in 1971.

Within a year she would make a chart-topping album, Winne Grammys, and Mary Singer James Taylor.

Her music spoke to the openness of her generation and earned her critical acclaim worldwide.

In hits like You're So Vane, Carly Simon exuded fearlessness, poise, but backstage she was grasping for both.

She disliked the spotlight and had to will herself out of a case of stage fright to continue performing.

When Carly Simon started out, she never planned on performing.

When I started recording that was all I was going to do.

I wasn't going to get out on stage and do anything on stage.

I wanted to make demos for other people to record my songs.

So I recorded hoping that Dion Warwick would record one, hoping that Judy Collins would record.

I just made a glorified demo.

Turned out to be so glorified that we had string players.

And we had arrangements and things got more and more, became something that a record company wanted.

So a lecture record signed me.

...