Carly handles a most contrary reporter with a lot of grace and aplomb. He focuses on a review of
Spoiled Girl found in the
Daily News... When at the same time he had this review of SPOILED
GIRL from the
New York Times to glean comments and questions...
.. hmmmmm.... Well from one tabloid to another I guess......
Anyway, for a more insightful and intelligent review enjoy one-half of the review from the New York Times... (
BTW, SPOILED GIRL has just been re-released July 2012---check
Amazon.co.uk)
THE
POP LIFE
A SPICY
NEW ALBUM BY CARLY
SIMON
By
Stephen Holden
Published: August 7,
1985
SPOILED GIRL'' (
Epic/
Portrait),
Carly Simon's first
album in two years, is a spicy, lighthearted romp of a record in which the 40-year-old singer-songwriter imaginatively comes to terms with the frivolous spirit of mid-80's pop. Nine producers, including the electronic wizard
Arthur Baker, worked on the album, whose songs range in style from the kind of catchy folk-pop that has long been Miss
Simon's stock in trade to ultracontemporary dance-oriented tunes with electronically tricked-up textures.
Miss Simon's new record may be modish in its peppy insouciance, but it isn't all fizz and froth a la
Cyndi Lauper or
Madonna. For one thing, Miss Simon doesn't have the cartoonish cutie-pie voice of these younger female pop stars, and the record's shiny aural surfaces only partly mask the songs' darker undercurrents.
''Where my last album, '
Hello Big Man,' dealt a lot with the past - with my childhood and failed marriage -the songs on this album are all either in the present or looking forward,'' Miss Simon reflected recently. ''The title, which is really a joke, is my assessment of one aspect of myself. In a lot of the songs I'm poking fun at myself. The lyrics aren't so labored over, and some are completely free-association.''
The album's cleverest lyric, ''The
Wives Are in
Connecticut,'' begins by describing a middle-aged man savoring the excitement of an adulterous affair.
Midway in the song, Miss Simon mischievously punishes her protagonist by giving him a fit of paranoia in which he imagines all the liaisons his wife might be enjoying at home back in Connecticut. It was on the basis of this song that
Mike Nichols invited Miss Simon to compose the soundtrack for the movie ''
Heartburn,'' which stars
Meryl Streep and
Jack Nicholson and is based on
Nora Ephron's best-selling novel. For the movie, Miss Simon plans to write several songs expressing the inner thoughts of Miss
Streep's character, as well as the incidental music.
''The Wives Are in Connecticut'' is only one of a number of songs on the album that depict erotic love as an all-consuming, viciously competitive sport. While Miss Simon's lyrics are far more circumspect than
Erica Jong's prose, her narrators often sound like the first cousins of Miss
Jong's literary alter ego,
Isadora Wing. The lyrics on ''Spoiled Girl'' portray a smorgasbord of erotic adventures. From song to song, the feelings vary from avidly desirous, to jealous, to bored, to gloatingly triumphant, and the situations run from a dalliance with ''one of the world's great lovers'' (''
Anyone but Me'') to impressing a star-struck journalist with exotic lies (''
Interview'').
Where ''Spoiled Girl'' departs from Miss Simon's previous albums is in its suggestion that all this frantic romantic activity is really just a form of self-dramatization. The narrators of ''Interview'' and ''
Make Me Feel Something'' and the commentators in ''
Tired of Being a
Blonde'' and in the album's title song all view the sport of love as an exercise in acting. When the players get bored with their roles they simply change partners and start the drama over.
The album's darkest and most musically haunting song, ''
Black Honeymoon,'' is a chilling vignette about sexual jealousy elegantly produced in a style that suggests a folkish variant of
Steely Dan's pop-jazz by way of
Tina Turner's ''
Private Dancer.'' Written 10 years ago by Miss Simon and
Jacob Brackman, with a new chorus by its producer,
Andy Goldmark, it is one of the finest cuts Miss Simon has ever recorded.
Unfortunately, it is available only on the cassette and compact disk versions of the album and not on the record.
- published: 31 Jul 2012
- views: 3266