Prime Cuts: "Mother of Pearl," "Maybe I Never Loved You," "Do It Anyway"
Overall Grade: 4/5
At 83, Carly Simon returns with Comes in Waves, her first album of original material in 18 years, and thankfully she isn't interested in simply reliving No Secrets. Instead, Simon looks at love, family, regret, ageing and resilience from the perspective of someone who has lived long enough to know that few emotions arrive neatly. The album comes as Simon has revealed she is living with Parkinson's disease, giving its reflections on perseverance added weight.
Opening track "Howl" makes that clear immediately. Rather than whispering her way into a late-career record, Simon pushes back against resignation. Her voice has naturally aged, but her ability to communicate the emotional contradictions inside a lyric remains remarkably sharp.
The delicious "Maybe I Never Loved You" is classic Simon. Widely inviting speculation about ex-husband James Taylor, it initially sounds like a wonderfully cold dismissal of an old lover. But Simon keeps changing the emotional temperature. By the end, you're no longer certain whether she never loved him-or never stopped. That ambiguity is exactly where Simon excels.
Even better is "Mother of Pearl," a deeply personal song for daughter Sally Taylor. Simon mixes maternal devotion with regret over the consequences children inherit from their parents. When her voice catches emotionally, the moment doesn't need polishing; the vulnerability is the point.
Elsewhere, Andreas Vollenweider's harp gives "Slowly" an almost dreamlike quality, while "Love Has No Ending" turns words from W. H. Auden into warm, folk-leaning contemplation. The revived "Share the End," first recorded for 1971's Anticipation, cleverly allows the 83-year-old Simon to converse with her younger self.
Not everything is equally compelling. "Peaches" is charmingly eccentric but slight, and a few quieter passages drift into pleasant rather than essential territory. That's what keeps Comes in Waves at four stars rather than five.
But Simon saves another highlight for last. "Do It Anyway" could have sounded like generic encouragement; coming from her, it feels earned. As family voices, clapping and laughter accompany the ending, Simon leaves us not with mortality but with life continuing around her.
Comes in Waves isn't a flawless comeback, nor does it need to be. It is intimate, occasionally funny, sometimes bruised and frequently moving. More importantly, Carly Simon still sounds unmistakably like Carly Simon-still examining love, still refusing easy answers and, after all these years, still capable of surprising us.
