This is the final track on Carly Simon's No Secrets, an LP I love perhaps more than it deserves because, along with Paul Simon's One Trick Pony, it reminds me of my first days in my own house.
I'm inclined to write it off as a typical final track, in that it has things a little too pat, but an article by Mark Leviton takes it seriously:
Fortunately, the set concludes with another winner, 'When You Close Your Eyes,' co-written with Billy Mernit, a musical jack-of-many-trades who also met Simon in the Berkshires.
Mernit, who claims he supplied the 'clouds in my coffee' image for 'You’re So Vain,' told journalist Kenneth Walsh, “Carly and I used to like to sit at the piano and play four-handed, especially when we were writing together.”
One day, Simon had the first verse of 'When You Close Your Eyes' and Mernit was helping with lyrics. "Really what that song lacked was a bridge," he explained. "We played the chorus, and Carly said, 'What we need here is a big surprise,'’ so I just banged my hands down on a different chord, and sang 'Big surprise!' We both cracked up, but it worked."
The sweeping Buckmaster string arrangement elevates the song, full of emotion and joy, to an exceptional finale for the LP, which arrived on November 16, 1972.
But then I think Fire at Midnight from Jethro Tull's Songs from the Wood suffers from last-track disease. That probably won't stop me sharing it with you one day though.
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