Just as the fascination with music from the 60’s, ’70s and ’80s continues, so does the curiosity about what inspired some of the most enduring songs of those decades. People will never stop debating the question of who Carly Simon was singing about in “You’re So Vain,” for example…and along the same lines, fans are still wondering if Simon was the subject of the classic James Taylor and J.D. Souther duet, “Her Town Too.”
Written by Taylor, Souther and Waddy Wachtel, “Her Town Too” was released on Taylor’s 1981 album Dad Loves His Work and became his last single to reach the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 (it peaked at #11 in May of that year). The song also went all the way to #5 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and #21 on the Mainstream Rock chart.
Apparently, no shortage of listeners connected with the theme of the song, which tells the tale of a woman trying to get over a bad breakup while dealing with friends gossiping about what went wrong. But who inspired the lyrics?
Because Taylor’s marriage to Simon was falling apart at the time — and Souther’s romance with Linda Ronstadt was also ending — many naturally assumed that “Her Town Too” was about either Simon or Ronstadt (or both). Alas, neither Taylor nor Souther has ever been willing to spill the beans.
In fact, when the late Souther was asked in a 2011 interview with Songfacts whether he’d like to “clarify” the identity of the woman in “Her Town Too,” his response was emphatically clear: “Of course not,” he said, adding, “You think after all these years suddenly I’d rat somebody out?”
In the same interview, however, Souther did reference Ronstadt’s influence as a songwriting partner.
“In my case, the most revealing songs that I’ve written are always songs that I’ve written by myself,” he explained. “I have to say, in some way, I had an emotional collaborator on some of the early ones, just because I was with Linda so much, and she has such great ears and such a good heart and also she’s brilliant. She had a really deft brain for separating the wheat from the chaff — the things that she encouraged me to finish and the things that she liked. I was around really great women in those days; Joni [Mitchell] and Bonnie [Raitt] and Nicolette [Larson] and Linda and Judy [Collins], and all of them had a lot of influence on me as a songwriter.”
Related: 1973 No. 1 Soft Rock Hit Became a Timeless Breakup Anthem
“I love women and I listen to women, and those five girls were very present in my life at the time,” Souther continued.
“Particularly Linda and Judy. Judy had a lot of effect on my writing as a writer, and Linda a lot as a musician. Linda and I played music for each other constantly. She played me most of the country music that I’d been aware of, because I didn’t grow up listening to country music. My parents hated country music, so we never had it in our house.”
As for Taylor, he once claimed that “Her Town Too” was written about the “ex-wife of a mutual friend,” according to the book Long Ago and Far Away: James Taylor — His Life and Music, but we’ll likely never know for sure. Either way, the song remains a classic. In 2004, The Rolling Stone Album Guide praised the track as a “gently incisive divorce song,” ranking it “among [Taylor’s] finest pieces of writing.”
Related: Beloved Singer-Songwriter, Compared to Carole King and Joni Mitchell, Was ‘All But Forgotten’ Until 26 Years After Her Death
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