Songfacts®:

• Carly Simon steered clear of disco, but she caught a groove on "Why," a song written and produced by the Chic hitmakers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. When Chic's sound fell out of favor at the end of the '70s, Rodgers and Edwards started working with other artists - the Chic brand was toxic to radio because it was disco, but Carly Simon was more than welcome on playlists.
• Lyrically, the song finds Simon asking her ex why he treated her so badly. They clearly have a failure to communicate - all they hear when the other talks is "La-di-da-di-da," a line repeated four times to make up the chorus. This is a departure for Simon, who is an elegant wordsmith known for finding just the right phrase, but it's not out of character for Rodgers and Edwards, who would focus on the groove.
• A very low-budget video was made for this song showing Carly Simon larking about New York City, where she dances on the sidewalk and accosts some strangers at a café. It's a rare look at Simon dancing, and shows why that was never part of her show.
• Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards wrote "Why" for the 1982 comedy film Soup For One, for which they did the soundtrack. The film was a flop, but the soundtrack did a bit better.
• In Simon's home country of America, "Why" stalled at #74, but it did far better in the UK, reaching #10. In the late '80s, club DJs in Europe revived the song and in 1989 it was re-released as a single in the UK, this time going to #56.
• In 1990, the DJ CJ Mackintosh used the beat in a popular remix of A Tribe Called Quest's "Bonita Applebum."