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2022's Career Retrospective is Carly Simon. She's always been somewhat in the shadow of Joni Mitchell in my mind, so I'm looking forward to seeing how You're So Vain, Nobody Does It Better and Why? fit into the grand scheme of things.
I know she is related to the Simon of Simon and Schuster and that she had an upper middle class New York up bringing, but the rest is a bit of a mystery. |
Carly Simon
I recently came across a Wikipedia entry for the Album Era, the ‘period from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s’. Carly Simon’s career spans this time almost perfectly and her debut is a time capsule of the early history of the album. Pretty much made for dinner parties of the kind which saw this collection commissioned, it’s music for a new generation of confident women trying to make sense of the early 1970s.
Simon didn’t come to this entirely unprepared, having been in a folk duo with her sister in the mid 1960s and made a living writing music for other people. Here she’s the singer and main song writer, backed by a bunch of confident studio musicians (all of whom are, it is worth noting, male). It’s all very 1971, with a mixture of folk, country, pop, rock and psychodelia. The best songs are those which don’t sound like other people (the middle of The Best Thing, the whole of Another Door). The covers are intriguing and the whole thing is a solid start to Simon’s solo career. |
Anticipation
Coming just ten months after Carly Simon, Anticipation ditches the session musicians, the country stylings and the United States. Recorded in London, with a cover image photographed in Regent’s Park and lyrics reflecting the move across the Atlantic, Anticipation is bookended by two stand out tracks with a lot of quirky material in between.
The sequencing is fascinating, particularly in this day and age when people can pick and choose the order they hear tracks. It’ll be interesting to see if these 70s albums follow the ‘singles starting sides 1 and 2, weakest songs as penultimate tracks, statement tracks to finish’ pattern. In this case, side 2 kicks off with an utterly bonkers End of Days songs which will surely end up in some Marvel movie as the world explodes (again), which would never have been a single. Julie Through the Glass is an classic penultimate track, and the final track, ‘I’ve Got To Have You’, is a Kris Kristofferson song which smoulders with raw sexuality. It’s a slow burn, demanding your full attention; when it catches fire – with a cracking early 70s guitar solo and double tracked vocals - it explodes with an extraordinary intensity. Anticipation, the lead-off single, opening and title track - written by Carly - is its equal. On the showing of this and the other Carly lyrics here, there’s an honesty here which positions Simon as a singer songwriter unafraid of exploring her inner world. Which should be interesting as we move forward… |
No Secrets
There’s no getting around the fact that this is ‘The One With You’re So Vain On It’; the track is an instant classic. The combination of attitude, lyrics, killer chorus and earworm hook is stunning. The only surprise is that it’s the third track in. Featuring uncredited-but-unmistakable backing vocals from Mick Jagger, YSV swaggers all over the place and Simon emerges as a woman leading the charge into the bright new world of the 1970s.
Which is a bit odd, given the rest of the album is all good without being anywhere near as good as YSV. The songs are still fascinating, especially when you know just how autobiographical some of them are. It’s one thing to live life in the public eye, it’s quite another to write songs like Embrace Me, You Child about your father’s death when you were 15 or No Secrets in which you regret sharing quite so much about your past love life with your current husband, who also happens to be famous… That husband would be James Taylor, Mr Carly Simon at this point, who joins a stellar cast of backing musicians – Paul & Linda McCartney complete the Beatles/Stones circle, Doris Troy, the Queen of BV – and the Carly Simon band is augmented by as good a set of itinerant musicians as you could want. Going to number in the US, Canada and Australia and top ten most other places, No Secrets put Simon on top of the world. And where do you go from there? |
Hotcakes
Simon had married James Taylor in November 1972, the same month that her previous smash hit album was released; Hotcakes album is the sound of newly-wed, newly-pregnant bliss. It’s full of delight in domesticated detail but with Simon’s typically searing autographical honesty. It’s hard to believe that Simon isn’t sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences with you as you listen to songs about older sisters, husbands and grown-ups.
At almost 50 year’s distance, it’s clearly from a time and a place quite different to today. In that way, it’s similar to reading a novel or watching a film from the early 70s. Simon is still staking her claim as a modern woman, even if, yet again, she’s the only women in the studio when she’s recording nine of the eleven tracks (and the other two tracks have women as backing singers, not instrumentalists). This was kept off the number one spot by Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, two major singer songwriters whose reputations eclipse Simon’s. But Simon holds her own, and songs like Safe and Sound, Forever My Love and Haven’t Got Time for the Pain, even with their non-more-70s strings and lush arrangements, are excellent. Another dinner party classic. |
Playing Possum
The first thing which hits you about 1975’s Playing Possum is the LP cover. It’s a bit of a change from the previous artwork on Simon’s albums, to say the least. And the album’s lead off track, with its tales of anger, turning people on and making a ‘wild man out of you’, certainly suggests that this is heading into serious adult territory. Which it does, kind of.
The raw sexuality in songs like Look me in the eyes and Waterfall was a little more oblique on earlier albums, but there’s no denying that it was there. Musically, the songs are still beautifully crafted Dinner Party Pop. James Taylor contributes to four of the ten tracks, and the guest musicians are yet more evidence of the high esteem in which Simon was held; Ringo Starr and Dr John appear on ‘More and More’ (penned by Dr John) and Rita Coolidge chips in backing vocals on a couple of tracks. Lead off single ‘Attitude Dancing’ is evidence that Simon was looking for pop success – it’s pretty much written to be successful, with just the right amount of fluffy feel good nonsense to appeal to AM radio. The surprise is hearing Carole King (who is on my shortlist for future a retrospective listen) contributing backing vocals. But Simon is clearly having a ball, roping in friends and effortlessly surfing the 70s adult oriented pop rock wave. |
Another Passenger
The cover to this album sums it up. It’s a bit out of focus, somewhat pointless, and doesn’t show Simon in her best light. What is Simon looking at? Why? Why should we care? It’s all a bit, “Will this do?”. It’s not bad, as such, it’s just – well – another passenger in Carly’s career.
It’s not that Simon hadn’t realised that she needed to find something fresh after her previous couple of albums. She brought in a new producer, moved production to LA, and brought in the hugely successful Dooble Brothers and Little Feat as backing musicians. But all that seems to have happened is that they simply continued in the noodly vein which Simon had mined in far too many tracks on both Hotcakes and Playing Possum. Even Van Dyke Parks couldn’t do much with the material he was presented with, despite throwing all the studio tricks into ‘Darkness til dawn’. And even with 11 different guitarists, three different bass players and six drummers, the album simply sounds like more of the same session musicians doing very little to add much to the material. Weirdly, it seems to have been well reviewed by contemporary fans. Which might just go to show how undemanding music of the mid 1970s had become. I’m just hoping someone gives Simon the shove she needs to find something fresh in her music. |
Boys in the Trees
After the unfocused Another Passenger, this is a much more coherent album; bringing uber-producer Arif Mardin in brings a fresher sound and a consistent set of musicians. And when two of those musicians are drummer Steve Gadd and pianist Richard Tee - the session musician's session musicians with credits on literally hundreds of amazing tracks, you know that its producer means business.
This album followed the multi-million selling success of Nobody Does It Better, another track which will send you spiralling off into a world of extraordinary music if you explore the work of its writers Carole Bayer Sager and Marvin Hamlisch. As for the songs, You're The One has echoes of NDIB, Tranquillo (Melt My Heart) is a belter of a single and De Bat (Fly In Me Face) reminds you just how long ago 1978 was (Cultural appropriation? Racist pastiche? Dustbin of History? Yes to all). An interesting reboot, then. Let's see what happens next... |
Spy
Welcome to the 1980s! You're six months early too, as this album was released in 1979 but features a soon-to-be-cliched heavily processed 80s drum sound from the get-go on opening track Vengeance. And with Tim Curry singing backing vocals, it's a cracking opening to an entertaining turn of the decade time piece.
The musicianship is cliche-70s too, with guitarist David Spinozza joining the ranks as the piano ballads take backseat to out and out rock for most of this set. There's even a drum solo on closer Memorial Day, which features David Sanborn funking it up on Alto Sax. Tony Levin turns up too, last seen on Carly Simon, having spent much of the 70s building the reputation which would see him work with John Lennon, King Crimson and Peter Gabriel. As for where Carly's head is, We're So Close seems to suggest otherwise. And the Spy theme may or may not be related to the earlier Bond success, although Carly's quoting of Anais Nin on the sleeve might suggest otherwise. Ultimately, Spy is a long way from the dinner party piano stylings of earlier in the decade. The 80s beckon. |
Come Upstairs
Well, it’s a bold start – full on 80s synths, driving drums and utterly unsubtle innuendo (‘Come Upstairs, I’ll give you some wood’?). And in a super stylish 80s cover too, positioning Carly as being in total control. But at the same time, all is not well in Carly-land, as the lyrics to Come Upstairs, Jesse, In Pain, the extraordinary The Three Of Us In The Dark and Take Me As I Am make clear.
It’s a record of a break-up-before-the-break-up as Carly’s marriage to James Taylor disintegrates around her, and us. Listening to Taylor’s 1981 album Dad Loves His Work – which bizarrely features songs co-written with various Carly collaborators including Carly’s longtime creative partner Jacob Brackman and drummer Don Grolnick – you can hear the other side of this all-too-public marital collapse. Musically, it’s a bit all over the place. The Desert, the album finale, acknowledges the influence Joni Mitchell had on writers like Simon (which must have been interesting given Joni’s relationship with Taylor prior to Carly), with nods to Hejira. Them is a bizarre curiosity which could only really have been released in the early 80s, sounding like Martha and the Muffins meets Nigel Farage. Stardust is a dreadful attempt to re-write You’re So Vain for a stadium audience. All in all, a timepiece which must have made new record company Warner Brothers wonder who and what exactly they had signed. |
Torch“Say, Fred, how’s that new Carly Simon record getting on? You got Why? on it, uhuh? What other funk tunes did you record already?”
“Uh, no, that track isn’t due to be released until next year, on the Soup for One soundtrack album. We’ve been taking a more, uh, lounge jazz/standards direction in the studio.” “You do know it’s 1981, right? It’s not the 1950s, Fred.” This album is quite the left turn. But it’s a big statement when a singer songwriter opts to turn to an album of standards. Have they run out of steam? Are they finding it difficult to express how they feel? Is the zeitgeist turning against them? Everything about this album is a bit of a contradiction. Musically, it’s ridiculously conservative, and comes across as an attempt to circumvent the difficulties of keeping up with the musical trends of the early 80s. There are none of the new electronic sounds as used on the last two albums. These songs could have been recorded pretty much as they are at any point in the previous twenty years. After the opening track comes a trio of songs written in the 1940s and, if you were not aware of Simon’s troubles with love, you’re in no doubt where her head is after I’ll Be Around, I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good and I Get Along Without You Very Well. After a few listens, once you get past the weird out-of-time not-very-Carly feeling, it becomes clear that these are exceptional takes on these songs. They may be standards, but from this point on, anyone looking to perform these songs will have to take these versions into account. The standards (there are others from the 30s, 50s) are joined by new songs either written or embellished by Simon, as well as Not A Day Goes By from Stephen Sondheim’s then new musical Merrily We Roll Along. You can only imagine what James Taylor – to whom Simon is still married, just about, at this point – thought when he heard this set of torch songs which pretty much burned whatever bridges there might have been between Simon and Taylor. An album out of time which, strangely, makes it seem oddly contemporary. |
Hello Big ManForty years later, it’s difficult to appreciate how big an influence Jamaican music had on pop and rock in the late 70s and early 80s. Bob Marley, who died in 1981 two years before this album, had blazed a trail so bright, it touched just about everything one way or another. Carly Simon was not immune, having included the frankly awful pastiche De Bat (Fly in Me Face) on Boys in the Trees in 1978. This album includes a cover of Marley’s classic Is This Love?, which is almost entirely unnecessary except that she managed to recruit the sublime Sly and Robbie to play drums and bass on her version; even so, it’s about as sanitised a version of Bob’s song as it could be. You have to hope the rhythm section were well paid for their contribution here.
Elsewhere, after Torch’s throwback vibe, it’s back to standard 80s production with a vengeance. Opening track You Know What To Do could be used as the basis of a lecture on The Musical Trends of 1983 – all gated drums, synths stabs, multitracked vocals, layered choral effects and guitar parts by The Police’s Andy Summers. Simon finally divorced James Taylor in 1983, as summed up in It Happens Everyday, Orpheus and You Don’t Feel The Same, country ballads which are decidedly un-80s but very Carly. Final track Floundering sums everything up perfectly. It’s a sub Grace Jones meditation with a rolling reggae vibe and a lyric which comes straight from Simon’s inner child. This was the last album from Warner Brothers, who’d had enough after three patchy outings. It’s not hard to see why. |
Spoiled Girl
By 1985, pop music had become a fascinating mixture of live musicianship and electronica, and this album is a perfect example of the point midway between the Rock and Roll of the 60s and the Electropop of the 2010s. Just about every acoustic instrument has been fed through some kind of modulator but just about everything clearly began with someone touching an instrument. And if this sounds like an unhappy compromise, that’s because all too often, it is.
Adding to this cacophony are the sheer numbers of production staff trying to make sense of Simon’s music; there are nine different producers, 13 different songwriters and 30 plus musicians involved in the ten tracks. It’s no wonder it’s all over the place. That said, the production staff does include Arthur Baker, Don Was, Phil Ramone, Doug Wimbish and Luther Vandross, so, musically at least, there’s lots to pique your interest. The title might be intended to be ironic, but Simon does come across as being aloof, out of touch and, well, spoilt. And as ever, it’s striking that, 12 albums in, there are still no female musicians other than Simon herself; surely she is going to realise that women musicians exist at some point in her career? This was the sole Carly Simon album released by Epic; neither the album nor the singles from it troubled the charts and it looked like Simon’s career was, in Smash Hits speak, down the dumper. Time for a proper come back record? |
Coming Around Again
For anyone around my age, this is probably the first Carly Simon music you’ll have heard. The lead single and title track was a huge hit, reaching the top ten in the UK, the top twenty in the US and charting around the globe. Carly was back! Back! BACK! With yet another song written for a movie, in this case 1986’s Heartburn starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, one of Carly’s (many) old flames.
One thing with following Carly’s career and evolving life story is that it is the most extraordinary tale; if it were a novel, you’d scarcely believe the plot twists and incidents. Her life is nuts. If it was made into a movie, it would go a little like this: We open with Simon getting the news that Epic, her record label, is not going to renew her contract. Her junkie ex-husband James Taylor has just married the widow of one of the junkie founders of National Lampoon, who died falling off a cliff. Simon and Taylor’s 13 year-old and 10 year-old children don’t quite know what is happening. Out on Martha’s Vineyard, Carly is having a tempestuous affair with Russ Kunkel, drummer and producer on her recent record, Spoiled Girl. In a creative frenzy, Carly writes Coming Around Again, which is worldwide smash and catapults her back onto centre stage. The relationship with Kunkel doesn’t survive and Carly has a fling with a baseball star before meeting James Taylor lookalike James Hart on a train. Hart doesn’t know who she is – or, it turns out, who he is himself – and their first conversation is largely him telling her that he is a recovering alcoholic from a family blighted by alcoholism and that his ex-wife has run off with a bagpiper. And then Hart turns out, we find out later after twenty years marriage to Simon, to be gay. You can't make this stuff up. This album is a cracker, with the usual extraordinary guest stars – Stevie Wonder, Bryan Adams, Roberta Flack amongst others. The question is, what happens next? |
My Romance
Arista didn’t take long to cash in on Simon’s success, with a live Greatest Hits album and another movie soundtrack between Coming Around Again and this album of standards. Each of these sold in excess of 1,000,000 units worldwide and Simon was firmly back on the map.
By 1990, when this album was released, Simon had been married to Jim Hart for three years and was clearly back in control of her career. With no need to expose her soul, she recorded this album of standards, expressing herself through the words of others. To long time Carly watchers, this is fascinating. She’s clearly still obsessed with James Taylor (as demonstrated by songs such as I See Your Face Before Me, When Your Lover Has Gone and He Was Too Good To Me), but seems to be happy with her new husband (My Funny Valentine, Bewitched and Something Wonderful). The only Simon original must have a been an interesting listen for Carly’s new man. What Has She Got ends with the line ‘What has she got that I haven't got? What has she got? She's got you’. Hmm. As for the recording, gone are the myriad numbers of musicians and producers. There is one drummer, one percussionist, one guitarist, a couple of bass players and a pianist. Oh, and an orchestra, but just the one, as far as it’s possible to tell. Longtime drummer Steve Gadd is back alongside Jimmy Ryan on guitar. And it sounds much more consistent as a result. The concert film is a fantastic time capsule, with Harry Connick, Jr. joining on piano and bass. That, and Live From Martha’s Vineyard from 1987. But, as enjoyable as it is, a Standards album is a bit of a cop out. Roll on the 1990s. |
Have You Seen My LatelyThis is as relaxed as Carly seems to have been in ages. It's all very chill; AOR to the max, but no bad thing for that. It was a huge commercial success, spending months on the Billboard top 200
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