By Stefanie Syman [0]

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 [1] 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?

There was an effort to make this a really beautiful album [paradoxically] without too much effort. . . because it doesn’t have a real rhythm section, there’s not really bass or drums, we just did it with the voice being very central.

We picked out songs as if we were walking through a garden picking pieces of fruit: You know we said, “Oh that’s a great song, remember that?” I remember going to see Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, and he sang Jamaica Farewell, and “let’s try that. Let’s try Over the Rainbow,” that’s one of the most beautiful songs in all of the American songbook, if not the world’s songbook, and “do I dare?”

This [album] didn’t have any preconceptions. I got the musicians I wanted, and there were two of them, Teese Ghol and Peter Calo . . . and then Jimmy Parr behind a very simple console, and we just began making music up here on Martha’s Vineyard.

LIME: You’ve described this album as a new take on lullabies. Do you think it fills a void in today’s culture? Do you think we still look to pop music to soothe us?

One thing that seemed to stay pretty steady throughout [the making of the album] is that there is a soothing factor, and I think that within myself there is a need to soothe myself, and also to really take from the beautiful spring that was dawning here on the island. . . There was beautiful nature everywhere in our midst, and it was fairly easy to translate it into the recording process.

LIME: If you had to pick a favorite song on the album—one which best suits your mood today—which would it be and why?

I’ll Just Remember You. . . is the last song on the CD, and it’s one which I recorded as an afterthought. . . . I heard this song that my son [Ben Taylor] and David Saw, who also wrote Quiet Evenin', were playing in the kitchen. And I thought it was a Rogers and Hart song. . . .I thought it was one of the most beautiful songs I had ever heard. . . They said, “it’s a song that we just wrote within the last fifteen minutes.” And so I asked them to play it for me again, and said “Oh My God, I have to record that on the album. It doesn’t matter that this album is finished.”

[I’ll Just Remember You] has such a beautiful longing, wistful, melancholy, all-year-long, everyday, into-the-center-of-your-soul kind of message. And I would say that’s where I am today.

On Living the Change

LIME: It seems that you have been “living the change” for a long time—on the Vineyard you’re closer to nature, you grow a garden, you’ve made decisions not to do things, like tour, to spend time with your family instead. Can you talk about this? What form has living the change taken for you?

I drive a hybrid car. . . We don’t use anything except for organic [1] materials in our garden so that nothing will be leached into larger areas, and we don’t spray the trees with anything harmful. And I cook with organic foods only. By and large, we live an organic lifestyle. My daughter and son-in-law are about to build a cottage on my land here, and they’re going to use a compost [1] toilet and use all solar energy. . . We live [an organic life] to the point that we’re not even aware of doing it because it’s so commonplace to us. And I really have my son and my daughter to thank very much for making me more aware of the areas that I wasn’t following . . .Maybe in the last ten years there’s been a big change in the way I live my life.

. . .Not involving myself in hatred is [also] a huge part of feeling well. I would say that all the great spiritual masters and leaders have had that philosophy. So whether I’m reading Ghandi or whether I’m reading the works of Jesus Christ or whether I’m reading the Dalai Lama, all of those messages are from people who you can feel their hearts are so large and so beautiful and so much the kind of heart that I would want to emulate and that I would want to pass on to my children and that I would want to radiate. . . .

Listen to the full interview with Carly Simon for more on her new album Into White and Living the Change.

Buy Into White at Amazon.com [2].

Buy Into White at iTunes [3].