Your scarf, it was apricot

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

11/02/73 : No Secrets - Carly Simon


After first mentioning her 3 months ago, we've finally made it to Carly - I'm looking forward to this.  The only tracks of hers I can think I know are "You're So Vain", "Nobody Does It Better" and "Kissing With Confidence" - in the words of Meat Loaf, two out of three ain't bad...

Yeah - I liked this.  The fact that it's a woman's voice (our first for five months!) really doesn't hurt and she's got a lovely voice which manages to be clear whilst still interesting. It's also much more my sort of thing and we might as well start with the stand out track - would anyone like to make any guesses as to which one it is?  Well, it might just be "You're So Vain" - it's really a very fine track indeed, but I'm sure you already know that (and if you don't, go and listen to it immediately).  I also particularly liked "The Right Thing To Do", but there's a good variety of stuff on there.  Some of the tracks sound a bit cheesy at first listen, but I actually suspect they'd mostly be growers and the lyrics manage to be both instantly accessible and worthy of more study - it all feels very confessional without necessarily being obvious as to what she's talking about.

We're at #3 in the charts this week on its fifth week of a 26 week run, with this being as high as it got.  The rest of the top five were Elton, the LSO , Simon & Garfunkel and Status Quo with the highest new entry being Deep Purple (#13) andTony Christie (#19) being the next highest.  And I think we can guess who the highest lady is, but she's not alone this week with Karen (#44), Nana (#46) and Shirley (#49) keeping her company from afar.

Wikipedia has surprisingly little on the album with the only item of interest being Robert Christgau's particularly odd comment - "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?".  There's an awful lot of "eh?" in that statement.  Actually, I lied - there's some more interest when we look at some of the backing vocalists.  I think Carly might have been friends with some slightly famous people - obviously I was expecting James Taylor to be involved, but Mick Jagger and Paul & Linda McCartney were a bit of a surprise.

"Customers also listened to" Gerry Rafferty, Dom McLean, Carole King and Roberta Flack - some nice gentle sounds there.  As is Carly, but there's more depth in the lyrics here than I was expecting - it was an interesting listen and definitely feels like it would be a grower.

04/02/73 - Please, just make it stop.
18/02/73 - Some 70s rawk

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