Here's another 1972 album. Seems like every second album I owned and am reviewing came from 1972. I really was making up for lost time. After being in the army and only buying the odd one or two LP's, here I was back in the world and able to buy, store and play music at my leisure.
'No Secrets' was Carly's 3rd studio album and I bought it on the tails of the single 'You're So Vain'. I could probably write this whole post about that one song, there's so much mystery and legend around it, but it's all been said before without any real firm conclusion as to who it was really was about.
Before all that though, just a bit of background. Carly was the daughter of Richard L. Simon, which meant nothing to me until I found out he was co-founder of Simon & Schuster, at one time the third largest publishing house in the US. In the early 60's Carly and her sister Lucy recorded 3 albums under the name of The Simon Sisters. Lucy left to get married and in 1968 Carly was briefly lead singer for the New York group Elephant's Memory. I only know of them from 2 songs they did on the Midnight Cowboy movie soundtrack, but Carly had left by then.
Her first album, the 1971 eponymous 'Carly Simon' had the single 'That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be' and her second album 'Anticipation' gave us the single of the same name. The story goes that she wrote that song in 15 minutes as she waited for Cat Stevens to pick her up for a date!
'No Secrets' really was a major album for Carly. If the background players are anything to go by, it was always destined to be big. When you have people like Bonnie Bramlett (from Delaney & Bonnie), Paul and Linda McCartney and James Taylor as backup singers and Klaus Voorman, Ray Cooper and Nicky Hopkins among the musicians, you're 90% there.
It made sense for James Taylor to appear, they were married just a few weeks before the album was released and one of the tracks, 'Night Owl' was written by him. A couple of other tracks of note (IMHO) are 'The Right Thing To Do' and 'We Have No Secrets'.
Recording the background vocals for 'You're So Vain', Carly had Harry Nilsson in the studio. Mick Jagger came in, Harry realised they had a better connection so he backed away. The end result is that Mick has uncredited vocals on the chorus. Talking of that chorus, it was used almost 30 years later by Nine Inch Nails on their song 'Starfu**ers'. How's that for longevity and crossover.
Not all the reviews of the album and specifically that song, were pleasant. One commentator, Robert Christgau, wrote rather scathingly "if a horse could sing in a monotone, the horse would sound like Carly Simon, only a horse wouldn't rhyme 'yacht', 'apricot', and 'gavotte'. Is that some kind of joke?" Oh boy, harsh Robert.
Carly's following album, 1974's 'Hotcakes' had a duet with James Taylor, 'Mockingbird' and also had the single 'Haven't Got Time For the Pain' and in 1977 she did the theme song 'Nobody Does it Better' for the Bond movie 'The Spy Who Loved Me'. After that I pretty much lost track of her, which basically means for me, her best work was in the 70's.
No comments:
Post a Comment