Was listening to my personal greatest hits of Carly Simon’s Greatest Hits and realized that this woman is a mess.

In “Jesse” her ex comes back to town. She steels herself to avoid him, asks her friends to remind her what a shithole he is, but she gets pulled into Jesse’s undertow anyway:

Jesse, let’s open the wine
And drink to the heart which has a will of its own.
My friends, let’s comfort them—
They’re feeling bad, they think I’ve sunk so low.

Ha-ha-ha, now I can laugh at my stupid friends, since I won’t be needing them anymore, now that Jesse is in town, and things will surely work out with him this time, forever!

Truthfully I always want to stick up for Jesse. If he makes her feel excited enough to cut fresh flowers and wait by the phone, could he really be that bad? Maybe Carly should trust her gut and tell her friends to fuck off.

Signaled by use of a proper noun, “Jesse” feels more like a constructed fiction and less personal than her other popular songs. The music comes easy and light and doesn’t veer into the maudlin as readily.

—unlike some of the others, which carry the vagueness that comes with public confessional writing. In “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” she strings together a bunch of Lifetime-movie-ready images of marital dischord, decides marriage is an unwinnable trap, then accepts a proposal anyway because she doesn’t have the energy to say no.

“You Belong to Me” is a deliriously insane compound of despotic control and desperate neediness. (However I really like the line, “You don’t have to prove to me that you’re beautiful to strangers”—that’s an uncommonly sharp observation.) When she trills, “Tell her, tell her that I love you! Tell her I know you from a long time ago! Tell her she don’t even know you!”—she sounds brokedown. She sounds like she’s singing in an open bathrobe, and crying, in a train station.

Could this many portrayals of insane women in doomed relationships come from someone who experiences healthy relationships in real life? I am skeptical. If you think about how many love songs contain unhealthy views or plain terrible advice, you start to wonder how these people get hired as rock stars anyway.

“Nobody Does It Better,” her James Bond theme, is pretty awesome though and sounds only minimally like James Bond. Its one mention of a spy is sexily allegorical: “The spy who loved me is keeping all my secrets safe tonight.” She still seems unlevel here, but charm can make up for a lot.