The daughter of one of the founders of the famed publishing house Simon and Schuster, Carly Simon was born in NYC and raised in Riverdale. In her teens, she and her older sister Lucy performed together as The Simon Sisters and recorded an album in 1964. In 1971, Simon appeared as a folksinger in Milos Forman's comic look at the Generation Gap, "Taking Off". That same year, she released her first solo album and had a Top Ten hit with "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be". Like most of her work, it is a highly personal, fictionalized view of family life. In fact, most of Simon's compositions feature highly personal lyrics wedded to a variety of music styles ranging from blues to folk to pop. She went on to record close to twenty albums and several of her songs, including "Anticipation" (later used in a TV commercial for ketchup), "Haven't Got Time for the Pain" and "You Belong to Me" are now considered classics of the genre.

Simon had a hit with her recording of "Nobody Does It Like Me", the theme for the James Bond feature "The Spy Who Loved Me" (1977), written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager. After appearing in the concert film "No Nukes" (1980), she provided the lyrics to Charles Fox' music and performed "Something More" from Larry Peerce's "Love Child" (1982). Throughout the 1980s, Simon provided either vocals (the theme from Jonathan Demme's "Swing Shift" 1984) or theme music ("Torchlight" 1984) or both ("The Karate Kid Part II" 1986). Director Mike Nichols asked her to provide the score for his comedy "Heartburn" (1986) and although most of her work is only heard in snippets, it provided Simon with the hit song "Coming Around Again". She fared better with her second collaboration with Nichols, earning a Golden Globe, Oscar and Grammy for "Let the River Run", the upbeat, infectious theme for "Working Girl" (1988). Simon also provided the song score for Nora Ephron's "This Is My Life" (1992).

Simon, who has spoken frankly of her stage fright, has made a number of appearances on TV, including two popular concerts for HBO: "Carly in Concert: Coming Around Again" (1987), which was predominantly a collection of her best-known songs performed before a live audience and "Carly in Concert: My Romance" (1990), which featured popular standards, most by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. In 1995, she was the subject of a profile on the Lifetime network, "Intimate Portrait: Carly Simon" which was followed by a taped presentation of "Carly Simon Live at Grand Central". For the latter, she received a CableACE Award for the song "Touched by the Sun" which she wrote in tribute to her friend Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

In addition to her music, Simon has authored four children's books and an opera for children, "Romulus Hunt". From 1972 to 1983, she was married to singer-songwriter James Taylor, with whom she recorded a hit version of "Mockingbird", she has been married to poet and author James Hart since 1987. Her two children with Taylor, daughter Sally and son Ben, have been featured on her albums since 1980.