About The Song
“Let the River Run” is a song written, composed, and performed by American singer-songwriter Carly Simon, and the theme to the 1988 Mike Nichols film Working Girl.
The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song (tying with “Two Hearts” by Phil Collins and Lamont Dozier from Buster), and the Grammy Award for Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or Television. Simon became the first artist in history to win this trio of awards for a song composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist.
According to a FAQ on Carly Simon’s website, she found inspiration for the lyrics by first reading the original Working Girl script, and then Walt Whitman’s poetry. Musically, Simon has described the song as “a hymn to New York” and an “anthem with a jungle beat,” contrasting those opposites in a compelling way.
This wasn’t the first time Carly Simon worked on a Mike Nichols movie. She contributed “Coming Around Again” to his 1986 film Heartburn, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.
Simon described Nichols, who died in 2014, as “kind of a muse” for the two songs. “Mike and I started not really dating but we started seeing each other before we started working together,” she explained in the book Anthems We Love. “He was always going to give you something great every time you talked to him. And I wanted to do the same for him. I wanted to be the same persona for him.”