Tag: Carly Simon

Title: Carly Simon – No Secrets (1972) [MFSL 2016]
Genre: Pop, Rock
Format: SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

Carly Simon’s best album, No Secrets was also her commercial breakthrough, topping the charts and going gold, along with its leadoff single, “You’re So Vain.” That song set the album’s saucy tone, with its air of sexually frank autobiography (“You had me several years ago/When I was still quite naïve”) and its reflections on the jet-set lifestyle. But Simon’s honesty meant that her lyrical knife was double-edged; now that she felt she had found true love (“The Right Thing to Do,” another Top Ten hit, was her celebration of her relationship with James Taylor), she was as willing to acknowledge her own mistakes and regrets as she was to point fingers. But it wasn’t only Simon’s forthrightness that made the album work; it was also Richard Perry’s simple, elegant pop/rock production, which gave Simon’s music a buoyancy it previously lacked. And Perry paid particular attention to Simon’s vocals in a way that made her more engaging (or at least less grating) to listen to.

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Title: Carly Simon – Hotcakes (1974) [MFSL 2016]
Genre: Pop, Rock
Format: SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

A glowing, pregnant Carly Simon smiles out from the cover of Hotcakes, one of her biggest selling albums, which featured the gold single “Mockingbird,” a duet with her husband James Taylor that effectively remade the old Inez and Charlie Foxx hit and bested it on the charts. The album also included another hit, “Haven’t Got Time For The Pain,” as well as “Misfit,” in which a wife implores her carousing husband to come home, and “Think I’m Gonna Have A Baby,” which celebrated the joys of same. With such tracks, Hotcakes was an autobiographical concept album that defined domestic bliss at a time when Simon’s listeners also were catching their breath and turning inward.

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Title: Carly Simon – Carly Simon (1971) [MSFL 2015]
Genre: Pop, Rock
Format: SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

“That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” the leadoff track of Carly Simon’s first album and a Top Ten hit, in which the singer expresses reservations about getting married, benefited from a sense of role reversal – it’s such a guy sentiment, but sung by a woman in 1971, it came across as a feminist statement, consistent with the overall disillusionment so prevalent then. Nothing on the rest of the album was quite as pointed, though the other songs maintained the same ambivalence toward romance. The one other standout track, “Dan, My Fling,” in which the singer tries to rekindle a relationship with a man she has discarded, was, like the single, co-written by Jacob Brackman (in this case, with Fred Gardner, not Simon), suggesting that the real creative talent here was him and not her (especially since the writing credits also featured another four names). And since Simon, with her plaintive, proper, and relatively inexpressive voice, was such an unremarkable performer, her debut seemed less auspicious than the attention it attracted might have implied.

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Title: Carly Simon – Anticipation (1971) [MFSL 2016]
Genre: Pop, Rock
Format: SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

Carly Simon’s second album found her extending the gutsy persona she had established on her debut album, notably on the title track and “Legend in Your Own Time” (both of them hit singles), and “I’ve Got to Have You.” The latter especially suggested a frankly passionate person whose vulnerability was a source of strength, not weakness, a valuable feminist trait and one Simon would pursue in her later work.

hraudio | allmusic | discogs

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