Carly Simon Built Comes in Waves from Kept Fragments

Carly Simon released the twelve-song Comes in Waves on 14 August, her first album with original material since 2008. That fact invites the familiar language of a comeback. Simon's own account is stranger and more useful: she did not begin again so much as reopen what she had kept.

On her official site, Simon writes: “But the songs, in splinters and scraps, half-formed or strangely complete, never stopped coming.” They appeared in the bedroom, kitchen, car and barn. She kept notebooks, working tapes, drafts and boxes of recordings. Parts of the songs on the new album had spent years waiting among them.

That habit became a working method when ordinary days grew harder to organise. In July, Simon disclosed that she had Parkinson's disease and had also been treated for skin cancer. In a statement carried by the Associated Press, she said working on music gave shape to days that did not always have much shape. Illness altered the conditions of the work without becoming its entire subject.

The record is not simply the contents of an archive box. Simon wrote Howl with David Spencer, who also produced the single. Her children Ben and Sally Taylor contributed, alongside longtime collaborators Paul Samwell-Smith and Frank Filipetti. Among the newer material sits a remaster of Share the End, a decades-old political song.

Associated Press reviewer Hillel Italie hears the album moving from defiance through regret and melancholy towards another willingness to try. Simon offers a related image for the title: feelings and identity return in waves, not along a straight line. On this record, old and new are less neatly separated than they are on a tape-box label.

Howl opens the album as a present-tense song. Its anger has to be voiced before it can recede. Simon's stored fragments behave the same way: once they leave the boxes, their age matters less than the fact that someone has gone back to work on them.