Wild Mass Guessing/Music/You're So Vain Theories

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Carly Simon's hit You're So Vain is said to have been written about a famous man with whom she had a very bad relationship (link goes to The Other Wiki). Carly refuses to admit who this man is (although she's said that each verse is about a different person); only one other person knows and he is sworn to secrecy (see below). The person addressed in the song remains a mystery, but we have our theories...

It's David Geffen.

"You're So Vain" is about none other than Odin, ruler of the Norse pantheon.

Let's recap:

  • "Your hat strategically dipped below one eye" -- Odin sacrificed one of his eyes to drink from the Well of Wisdom, giving him knowledge of the past, present, and future. In his guise as Vegtam, the Wanderer, he's often depicted with a hat with a wide brim, angled to hide his empty socket.
    • Likewise, he "had one eye on the mirror" because he only has one eye, period. Two-eyed people are typically incapable of keeping just one eye on something.
  • "Your horse naturally won." -- Odin's eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, naturally wins races against ordinary four-legged horses.
  • "You flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun." -- There was a total eclipse of the sun in Nova Scotia on July 20, 985, just about the time the Vikings were spreading into Greenland, and that Norwegian Bjarni Herjolfsson may have landed in Newfoundland. Given that Odin would likely be with his worshippers in either of those places, it's not that far of a flight (the "Lear jet" is obviously a modern metaphor for whatever transportation Odin would have used) to Nova Scotia.

"You're So Vain" is about Roger Daltrey.

And concurrently, the same person referred to in "Who Are You?" is Carly Simon. The two had a tryst in the early 1970s that ended badly. Carly wrote "You're So Vain" to get back at him. When he finally realized what was going on, Roger came up with "Who Are You?" to express his feelings about the whole thing -- lamenting that nobody can measure up to her but recognizing that she was a duplicitous, evil woman who he never truly knew.

The person in "You're So Vain" is the real Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's secret informant during his investigation into the Watergate scandal.

In the early aught's (2005), Deep Throat's identity was revealed to be FBI Associate Director William Mark Felt. Just a few years earlier (2003), Dick Ebersol made a winning bid of bid $50,000; he won the opportunity to be told, by Carly Simon herself, who the song is about. So the identity of the "You're So Vain" guy is revealed two years before "Deep Throat" identifies himself. Coincidence? Oh, we don't think so.

The person referred to in Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" is the same person in Billy Joel's "You Had to Be a Big Shot". And the same person from Sheryl Crow's "My Favorite Mistake". And it is also whomever Alanis Morissette is angry at in "You Oughta Know" and whomever Roger Daltry is angry at in Who Are You.

"You're So Vain" is always about the listener.

Well, it is written using second person pronouns...

"You're So Vain" is about Fred Jones from Scooby Doo

All the girls want to be his partner and he wears an apricot scarf. Who else could it be, really?

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