Consider if you will the striking nature of the photograph of Carly Simon on the jacket of her second album, Anticipation, (Elektra-EKS 75016) and you will have a clue to the equally striking nature of the music. There she stands in one of Hyde Park's gates, leonine and regal in her characteristic, spreadout stance,
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looking tall and powerful in her well-heeled boots and diaphanous dress–the epitome of what some people like to think of as the New Woman. But because of the widespread success last summer of her single, "That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be," this New Woman image can prove to be a difficult burden for an artist to carry around. On one hand the New York Times evokes The New Woman in an inane excuse to print a fatuous article about Carly in their women's page ghetto (which dutifully includes a couple of recipes) and on the other angry feminists decry her "That's the Way" as a lame statement of resignation of the female plight rather than the sarcastic and ironic condemnation that it was.
If there are traces of an emerging, strong female consciousness on this new album, they appear as much in Carly's attitude to her role as a musician and singer as in the music itself. The music of Anticipation consists of starkly frank and carefully manicured songs about the vagaries of the male/female saga. They are a strange set of love songs, more like a cycle of the wide range of the emotional pulls and tugs that love connotes. She sings sometimes as an acute observer of the life conditions of a fellow human, sometimes as an equal partner in a shattered affair, sometimes as a bemused annotator of losing battles and the highly-charged moment flying away.
The title song is the first cut. "Anticipation" is a spirited examination of the tensions involved in a burgeoning romantic situation in which nobody has any idea of what's going on or what's going to happen. The song is as much a vehicle for Carly's fine band, which she assembled after her first album (recorded entirely with studio musicians) was released and kept with her through these sessions in London, which were produced by Paul Samwell-Smith, ex-Yardbird and also Cat Stevens' producer. Carly's fine, aggressive vocal is complemented by Paul Glanz' lyrical piano comping, and drummer Andy Newmark's rhythms are to the point. The cut winds up with a surprising coda crescendo that pithily wraps up the premise of the message about anticipating things to come–"Stay right here, 'cause these are the good old days."
"Legend in Your Own Time" is about anyone who has achieved a measure of fame and has been working at it since their youth. That the most famous folks are often the loneliest is one of the tiredest truisms in show-biz, but Carly convinces the listener that her story is a personal one rather than a generalization. Our First Day Together" is a re-creation of just that. It's a quiet song, lovely and quite enigmat
