By 1977, Carly Simon was already a successful singer-songwriter. She already had self-penned hits like “You’re So Vain”, “Haven’t Got Time For The Pain”, and more. But Simon didn’t write all of her songs. In fact, one of her biggest hits, “Nobody Does It Better”, was written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager instead.
“Nobody Does It Better” is part of the soundtrack for the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. Starring Roger Moore, it is the only hit single from the record. “Nobody Does It Better” earned Simon a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female.
Videos by American Songwriter
“Nobody Does It Better” says, “I wasn’t looking, but somehow you found me / I tried to hide from your love light / But like Heaven above me / The spy who loved me / Is keeping all my secrets safe tonight.”
Credit for the idea of “Nobody Does It Better” goes to Sager.
“I don’t know how I came up with it,” Sager admits. “I just thought about James Bond, and that’s what popped out of my mouth. Marvin instantly loved it. And within seconds, we’d both forgotten the song we’d gotten together to write, and he was playing the melody of the chorus.”
Moore played Bond for seven films. He says “Nobody Does It Better” is his favorite song from any of the James Bond films.
“It is a terrific song as it embodies everything about Bond’s character,” he later said. “And why he is better and more popular than other movie spies.”
What Carole Bayer Sager Says About Writing “Nobody Does It Better”
The chorus of “Nobody Does It Better” says, “Nobody does it better / Makes me feel sad for the rest / Nobody does it half as good as you / Baby, you’re the best.” Although Sager, a former English teacher, knew “nobody does it half as good as you” was not correct grammar, she was unwilling to rewrite it to make it correct.
“I knew, having taught English, that ‘half as good as you’ was not proper grammar,” she concedes. “But writing ‘Nobody does it half as well as you,’ which is correct, sounded terrible to my ear. Many times in writing songs, I made grammatically incorrect choices because certain words just sang better and sounded better to me than others.”
In 1987, Julie Andrews included a cover of “Nobody Does It Better” on her Love, Julia project. It was not released as a single.
Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns