Here Comes The Flood: Carly Simon: Never Been Gone

Carly Simon was huge in the Seventies and the Eighties - a singer who could sing nasty lyrics over a lush mainstream pop backing. You're So Vain is one of the all time great put-down songs and Nobody Does It Better is pretty near the top of memorable James Bond songs. She fell off the radar in the Nineties, writing occasional film scores and came back to the spostlight when she wrote the theme songs for the Disney Winnie the Pooh films Piglet's Big Movie in 2003 and Pooh's Heffalump Movie in 2005. Her 2008 album This Kind of Love shipped a respectable amount of copies, although she fell out with her label claiming that the promotion was below par.

For her latest offering Never Been Gone Simon looks back with acoustic versions of her back catalog. Recorded in her Martha's Vineyard home she has found joy in singing the oldies, rearranging and dropping her vocals with an octave. It's a warts-and-all recording at times - giggling at the start of It Happens Everyday and re-enacting the Saturday Night Live "More Cowbell" skit at the end of You're So Vain.

Two new songs have made the cut. No Freedom has loops that sound as if they were recorded in a trashcan and adding tons of echo to her vocals wasn't such a great idea, but the lyrics are classic Simon: "Hey now, you might have a hit On the radio / Success might scoop you up / And never let you go / But there ain’t no freedom / When you got a worryin’ mind". Songbird is a rather murky sounding demo with the piano drowning her out until she reaches the final bars of to end the song with a flourish.