The 1970s File Feature
The Right Thing To Do
Carly Simon and "The Right Thing To Do": A Tender Portrait of Domestic Contentment When Carly Simon released "The Right Thing To Do" in the spring of 1973, s…
01 The Story
Carly Simon and "The Right Thing To Do": A Tender Portrait of Domestic Contentment
When Carly Simon released "The Right Thing To Do" in the spring of 1973, she was riding one of the most remarkable creative waves in contemporary popular music. Her previous single, "You're So Vain," had spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and had become one of the most talked-about songs of its era, generating speculation about its mysterious subject that persisted for decades. Against that backdrop of charged, acerbic observation, "The Right Thing To Do" arrived as a deliberate counterweight: warm, unguarded, and suffused with the kind of uncomplicated happiness that Simon was not always associated with in the public imagination.
The song appeared on No Secrets, the album Simon released on Elektra Records in November 1972. Produced by Richard Perry, who had also produced the preceding album Anticipation and who would become one of the most in-demand producers of the decade, No Secrets was a commercial and critical triumph. It reached number one on the Billboard 200 and spent the better part of winter 1972 and spring 1973 at the top of the album charts. "You're So Vain," extracted as the lead single, was the engine that drove the album's enormous commercial success, but it was "The Right Thing To Do" that offered the clearest glimpse of the emotional range Simon was capable of deploying across a single record.
Simon wrote the song herself, drawing on the happiness she was experiencing in her personal life. By the time No Secrets was recorded, she had begun her relationship with James Taylor, the singer-songwriter with whom she would share a celebrated and publicly scrutinized marriage beginning in November 1972. The song reflects the ease and security of a relationship that felt, to its author, genuinely right rather than merely convenient or exciting. That simplicity was in some respects a daring artistic choice at a moment when confessional pop songwriting was more often deployed in the service of heartbreak and ambivalence than domestic contentment.
"The Right Thing To Do" entered the Billboard Hot 100 on March 31, 1973, debuting at number seventy. It climbed steadily through the spring, reaching its peak position of number seventeen during the week of May 26, 1973, and spending thirteen weeks on the chart in total. By the standards of the blockbuster singles Simon had released in the preceding period, it was a modest performer, but it served an important artistic function in demonstrating that her appeal was not contingent on controversy or mystery. The song reached listeners who appreciated its candor and directness, and it received considerable airplay on the adult contemporary formats that were then rapidly expanding their foothold in American radio.
Richard Perry's production on the track is characteristically polished without being sterile. The arrangement is built around acoustic guitar and understated rhythm section work, with orchestral touches that frame Simon's vocal without overwhelming it. Perry understood that the song's power derived from its intimacy, and he resisted the temptation to inflate the arrangement beyond what the material required. Simon's voice, already recognized as one of the most distinctive instruments in popular music, carries the full emotional weight of the lyric with a relaxed assurance that suits the subject matter perfectly.
The song's chart journey coincided with a period in which singer-songwriters occupied an unusually prominent position in American popular music. Artists such as James Taylor, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Cat Stevens had collectively redefined what commercial music could accomplish emotionally, and Simon was among the most commercially successful members of that cohort. Her particular gift was for writing songs that felt simultaneously personal and universally relatable, a quality that "The Right Thing To Do" exemplifies in concentrated form.
Carly Simon had come to prominence relatively late compared to some of her contemporaries. Born in New York City in 1945, she had performed briefly in the early 1960s as part of the Simon Sisters duo with her sister Lucy before embarking on a solo career that began in earnest with her self-titled debut album in 1971. That album produced the hit "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," which reached number ten on the Hot 100 and established her as a significant new voice in American pop. Anticipation followed in 1971, and No Secrets in 1972, and by the release of "The Right Thing To Do," she was one of the most commercially prominent and critically respected artists of her generation.
The legacy of "The Right Thing To Do" within Simon's catalog is somewhat understated, owing largely to the gravitational pull of its companion singles from No Secrets. Yet the song captures something genuine and rare in pop music: a convincing account of happiness that does not feel saccharine or performative. In an era defined by confessional songwriting, Simon demonstrated that the confessional mode could encompass contentment as well as suffering, and that songs celebrating a relationship could carry as much emotional integrity as those lamenting one. The track remains a quiet but important entry in the Simon canon, and its presence on one of the defining albums of the early 1970s ensures its place in any serious accounting of the period's musical achievement.
02 Song Meaning
Happiness as Subject: The Emotional Architecture of "The Right Thing To Do"
"The Right Thing To Do" occupies an unusual position in Carly Simon's songwriting catalog precisely because its central emotion is contentment rather than longing, betrayal, or ambivalence. Where so much of the confessional pop tradition that Simon inhabited drew its energy from conflict and pain, this song builds its emotional architecture around the simple, persuasive feeling that a relationship is working and that its existence is a source of genuine pleasure. That is a more difficult artistic proposition than it might appear: happiness in song is frequently rendered as either saccharine or unconvincing, and the challenge of writing about contentment without sentimentality is one that many skilled songwriters have failed to meet.
Simon meets the challenge by grounding the song's affirmative stance in specificity and personal detail. The narrator is not describing love in abstract or idealized terms but rather articulating a felt sense of rightness about a particular relationship at a particular moment. The word "right" in the title and throughout the song carries considerable weight: it suggests not merely pleasure or excitement but something more considered, a genuine alignment between the narrator's inner life and her outward circumstances. This is love that has been reflected upon, not merely experienced, and the distinction gives the song a quality of earned certainty that distinguishes it from simpler celebrations of romantic feeling.
The biographical context enriches but does not limit the song's meaning. Simon wrote "The Right Thing To Do" during the period of her developing relationship with James Taylor, and the warmth and security that the song conveys clearly draw on that real-world experience. Yet the song is crafted in a way that allows any listener to inhabit its emotional position, to recognize in its account of domestic happiness a reflection of experiences they have known or desired. This is the hallmark of successful confessional songwriting: the most personal material, rendered with sufficient care and craft, becomes universal.
The song also represents a specific moment in Simon's artistic development, coming immediately after the brilliant but caustic "You're So Vain" on the same album, No Secrets. The contrast between the two songs is not incidental but reflects a genuine breadth of emotional range. Where "You're So Vain" observes its subject with cool, devastating precision, "The Right Thing To Do" opens itself to vulnerability without defensiveness. The juxtaposition on the album suggests an artist who is fully in command of her emotional register, capable of withering critique and disarming tenderness in equal measure.
Producer Richard Perry's understated arrangement is itself thematically meaningful. The gentle, unhurried quality of the music mirrors the song's emotional content: this is not the sound of excitement or crisis but of settled, comfortable happiness. The acoustic textures and measured tempo create a sonic environment that feels domestic and warm, appropriate to a song about the pleasures of an established relationship rather than the intensity of a new one.
The song's chart performance, reaching number seventeen on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1973, confirmed that listeners responded to its message with genuine enthusiasm. In a cultural moment defined by considerable social upheaval and the aftermath of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, a song that affirmed the uncomplicated satisfactions of personal love carried its own quiet resonance. "The Right Thing To Do" offered its audience a vision of happiness that felt neither naive nor unearned, and that emotional authenticity remains the core of its enduring appeal.
Decades after its original release, the song continues to stand as evidence that the affirmative mode in pop songwriting need not sacrifice emotional seriousness. Simon's accomplishment in "The Right Thing To Do" is to have written a song about happiness that is as thoughtful and artistically substantial as any of her songs about pain, and in doing so to have expanded the emotional vocabulary of the confessional tradition she helped define.
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