There are certain voices that belong to a specific kind of American afternoon — the kind that arrives on the radio without warning and suddenly the room feels different. Carly Simon has been one of those voices for more than fifty years. On Monday, July 27, she explained why that voice had gone quiet.
Simon, 83, confirmed in a statement reported by The Hollywood Reporter that she has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. She has also undergone treatment for skin cancer. Together, those two facts account for an extended stretch of public absence that her fans had noticed but not yet understood.
Her words, offered directly to those fans, were not a retreat. “I have not stopped living,” she said. “I have not stopped working.” The proof of that is arriving shortly in the form of a new studio album, Comes in Waves, which Simon completed during the period she was also managing her health.
Simon first broke through in 1971 and reached a different kind of cultural altitude two years later with “You're So Vain,” a song that generated a four-decade guessing game about its subject and became one of the more durable parlor games in pop history. She won an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Golden Globe — the latter for “Let the River Run” from the 1988 film Working Girl — and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.
Parkinson's is a progressive neurological condition that affects movement and, over time, can affect speech. Its impact on a recording artist carries specific weight. That Simon is releasing an album now, on her own terms and timeline, is the detail her statement is built around.
Comes in Waves does not yet have a confirmed release date as of Monday morning.