Some voices are timeless.\u00a0 Whether because of their instant recognizability, or because of the choices the singer makes — songs, phrasing, arrangements — they seem to develop a kind of easy, almost familial familiarity as the years go by.\u00a0 They could sing the alphabet, and by the time they got to \u201cc\u201d you\u2019d be saying to yourself, \u201cThat\u2019s ____\u201d — and you\u2019d be right.<\/p>\n
The fill-in-the-blank in this case is Carly Simon.\u00a0 After a nearly 40-year career that has spanned folk, singer-songwriter pop, torch songs, soundtracks and a \u201cfamily opera,\u201d she\u2019s made another album of songs that, while there\u2019s a loose theme to them, essentially hang together on the strength and character of her rich, liquid-honey voice.<\/p>\n
Into White<\/i> is a collection of standards, in a sense — but standards as judged by the singer, not a producer or any consensus of critics.\u00a0 From folk traditionals (\u201cOh Susanna\u201d) to reggae classics (\u201cJamaica Farewell\u201d) to lullabies (\u201cI Gave My Love a Cherry\u201d) to Lennon & McCartney (\u201cBlackbird\u201d), on this 14-track disc Simon puts a shine to one well-loved nugget after another from the last 100 years of popular music.<\/p>\n
The question is — as always on a disc dominated by well-known covers — can Simon actually bring anything new to a song as iconic as \u201cScarborough Fair\u201d?\u00a0 Could anyone?\u00a0 You could call her version \u201cSimonized\u201d and it would be both true and a compliment; her rich, earthy tones meld with the plucked acoustic, piano, and flute in a sublime meditation. <\/p>\n
The same is true of the equally\u00a0celebrated \u201cBlackbird,\u201d \u201cOver The Rainbow\u201d and \u201cYou Are My Sunshine\u201d — you already know the words and the tune, but the chance to hear Simon interpret them creates instant appeal.\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t simply give them rote readings, though — \u201cOh Susanna,\u201d for example, gets livened up with a fresh, surprising arrangement featuring kalimba\u00a0and flute.<\/p>\n
Not all of the covers are obvious ones, though.\u00a0 In an audacious move, Simon takes a swing at ex-husband James Taylor\u2019s gorgeous ballad \u201cYou Can Close Your Eyes\u201d and knocks it clean out of the park, setting it to piano and singing it in a trio with her and James\u2019 children Ben and Sally — an intensely poignant sonic gene-pool mash-up. <\/p>\n
Simon mixes in a few originals that are solid and reach for that \u201cstandard\u201d feel, but can\u2019t match the interest and resonance of the covers.\u00a0 She might have been better off carrying the theme 100% of the way through.\u00a0 The nice thing about being at the stage in your career that Carly Simon is, though — i.e. a timeless icon — is that you can pretty much make the album you want and leave the neurotic second-guessing to critics like me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":28688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7872],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-40178","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-carly-simon","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40178"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}