Carly Simon / Into White / 2007
Over the Rainbow
wistful, tender, gently melancholic
Carly Simon covers the classic Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg standard on her 2007 lullaby album, stripping it down to its essential yearning rather than adding new lyrical material. The performance reads as an act of curation rather than reinvention, letting the song's decades-old ache for elsewhere do the work.
longing for elsewhere childhood wonder escapism hope deferred
Who's speaking
A first-person dreamer addressing no one in particular, musing aloud about a better place just out of reach; the voice is sincere rather than ironic.
What happens
The song moves from description of an imagined faraway land, to a private wish made on a star, to a final plaintive question about why that land remains unreachable while birds can get there freely.
How it's built
Simon preserves the original's structure intact: two parallel verses establishing the rainbow-land, a bridge (the 'somewhere' wish and the melting troubles), and a closing verse that turns the song's declarative hope into a repeated, unanswered question.
Section by section
Opening verses
The song establishes its imagined destination through soft, childlike imagery, associating it with lullabies and clear skies, setting a tone of innocent hope rather than adult striving.
Bridge
“troubles melt like lemondrops”
The wish becomes concrete and almost domestic, using a candy image to render emotional relief as something small and edible, which softens the song's ache into something soothing rather than desperate.
Closing verse
“why then, oh why, can't I”
The comparison to birds who can simply fly past the rainbow reframes the entire song: what began as description of a hoped-for place ends as a confession of being stuck, with the repetition of the question amplifying its plaintiveness rather than resolving it.
Craft
- symbol
- The rainbow functions as a threshold between ordinary reality and an idealized elsewhere, never literally described beyond its color and height.
- simile
- Troubles are compared to melting candy, converting emotional pain into something small, sweet, and dissolvable, fitting the song's lullaby register.
- anaphora
- The repeated 'somewhere over the rainbow' opening phrase builds the song's incantatory, dreamlike pull before the final section breaks the pattern with a question.
- rhetorical question
- The closing repeated question about why birds can fly there but the speaker cannot shifts the song from wishful description to open longing, leaving resolution absent.
Reading it
Read most simply, the song is a meditation on the gap between imagined happiness and lived reality, using flight as a metaphor for freedom the speaker lacks. On Simon's lullaby album, the song likely functions less as personal confession and more as a soothing invitation for a child listener to imagine wonder and possibility, with the final unanswered question left gentle rather than tragic. Both readings coexist: the lyric's plain melancholy is real, but its placement in a lullaby context tempers that melancholy into comfort.
Context
This is the standard written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg for The Wizard of Oz (1939), covered countless times; Simon's version appears on Into White, an album of covers arranged as lullabies, suggesting the song is chosen for its familiar, comforting melody and its fit within a collection aimed at parents and children rather than for any new lyrical statement.
Listen for
- how the arrangement's tempo and instrumentation soften the song's inherent melancholy into something closer to comfort
- the shift from declarative hope in the early verses to open questioning in the final section
- the effect of hearing a very famous lyric performed without alteration, relying entirely on vocal tone and pacing for new meaning
- any vocal breath or pause Simon places before the final repeated question, which can either heighten or diffuse its poignancy
About Carly Simon
Carly Elisabeth Simon is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and author. She rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records; her 13 top 40 U.S.
b. 1943 / United States
Full biography and catalogue