LOS ANGELES — She’s so “vein.”
If you want to hear Carly Simon sing these days, you might have to hire her boyfriend to operate on you.
She rarely performs concerts due to a toxic combination of stage fright and fear of flying.
But her pal, Richard Koehler, is a laparoscopic surgeon in Plymouth, Mass., and she’s been known to accompany him to the operating room.
There, she soothes nervous patients by singing to them.
Sporting scrubs and surgical mask, she even takes requests.
“One of them asked for ‘Haven’t Got Time for the Pain,’ ” Simon said in a recent interview, referring to her 1974 hit.
“I told them how much fun it was, and that I was going to be holding their hand when they woke up, too,” she said.
“And then I watched the surgery and everybody thought that I was going to be grossed out and have to be taken from the room on a stretcher.
“I wasn’t at all,” she insisted.
“I was fascinated by it.”
Simon, 64, plans to swap such sterile surroundings for concert halls early next year, when she’ll tour Europe for the first time in her career.
The trek will help her promote her new album, “Never Been Gone,” which features acoustic renderings of her most famous tunes.