Eighteen years after This Kind of Love, her last album of original material, Carly Simon returns with Comes in Waves, a record that feels less like a comeback than the continuation of a conversation temporarily interrupted. Much has happened in the intervening years. Simon has published two memoirs, been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and largely withdrawn from recording. More significantly, the 83-year-old recently revealed that she has been living with Parkinson’s disease for several years, alongside other health problems.
Inevitably, that knowledge hangs over Comes in Waves, but this is far from an album dominated by illness or mortality. Instead, its twelve songs find Simon doing what she has always done best: examining love, loss, family, regret and resilience with intelligence, humour and painful honesty.
Recorded primarily at her studio on Martha’s Vineyard with a circle of close collaborators, including her children Ben and Sally Taylor and the late John Forté, Comes in Waves has an intimate, almost homemade quality. Simon's voice may now carry the passing of time, but that only adds another dimension to songs in which phrasing and emotional nuance matter as much as the words themselves.
She makes her intentions clear from the opening track, ‘Howl’. Against a jaunty, gently percolating piano melody, Simon urges the listener to “howl like the wind” and “roar like the river”. It is defiant without becoming melodramatic, a declaration that whatever life throws at you, sometimes the appropriate response is simply to make some noise.
From there, Comes in Waves settles into more familiar Simon territory. ‘Maybe I Never Loved You’ is wonderfully ambiguous, balancing bitterness, resignation and lingering affection. Its central thought, maybe she never loved him, although she thought she did, could easily have become straightforward recrimination, but Simon is too subtle a songwriter for that.
It is the way she delivers the final line, hesitating over whether perhaps she always will love him, that changes everything. Is this anger, denial, regret or acceptance? Simon leaves the listener to decide. More than half a century after ‘You’re So Vain’, she still understands the value of not explaining everything.
The similarly themed ‘The More I Look for You’ continues that exploration of relationships and memories that refuse to behave themselves. Inevitably, there will be speculation about whether former husband James Taylor is lurking somewhere within these songs, but identifying their subject is ultimately less interesting than what Simon does with the emotions behind them.
If romantic love remains complicated, maternal love is considerably less so. ‘Mother of Pearl’, written for her daughter Sally Taylor, is one of the album's most affecting moments. Simon looks back at Sally as a seven-year-old child dealing with her parents’ divorce, mixing apology with an unmistakable declaration of devotion. By the time she reaches the emotional cry of “My girl, oh my girl”, the autobiographical detail has become something universal: a parent looking backwards and wondering what they might have done differently.
Musically, Comes in Waves is equally comfortable moving between styles. ‘Love Has No Ending’, drawing on W.H. Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening, has a folk character coloured by mandolin and harmonica, while ‘Slowly’ has an almost hymnal quality. It is here that the phrase which gives the album its title appears, and it feels particularly appropriate. Memories, grief, happiness and creativity rarely arrive neatly or in order. They come in waves.
One of the album's most intriguing moments actually reaches back 55 years. Simon revisits ‘Share the End’, originally recorded for 1971’s Anticipation, with the original versions' producer, former Yardbirds bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, returning to help reshape it.
A song concerned with madmen, false leaders and a world apparently determined to destroy itself has acquired an uncomfortable new relevance. Simon's increasingly visceral vocal towards its conclusion transforms the song from an interesting excavation of her past into something urgent and contemporary. It also provides a reminder that while circumstances change, good songs have an unfortunate habit of becoming relevant again.
Not everything here is quite so weighty. Simon's sly humour, an essential but sometimes overlooked ingredient of her songwriting, surfaces on ‘Four in the Morning’. Written by her late friend Judy Belushi, the song finally receives a proper recording, decorated with bells, keyboards and assorted “weird little things”, with Belushi's own voice woven into the track. It is affectionate, eccentric and charming.
All of which leads to ‘Do It Anyway’, a deceptively simple closing song and perhaps the perfect ending to Comes in Waves. Against acoustic guitar, Simon offers encouragement to keep going even when you are convinced you cannot face another day or win another battle.
Then something lovely happens. As the record fades, Simon's family can be heard clapping, singing and laughing together, described in the sleeve notes simply as “the usual Thanksgiving fun”. After an album filled with memories, loss, fractured relationships and the passage of time, it ends not with a grand statement about mortality but with the sound of people enjoying being alive.
There is an understandable temptation to hear Comes in Waves as a late-career summation, particularly given Simon's age and recent disclosure about her health. But treating it as a farewell would do the album a disservice.
More than fifty years after Anticipation and ‘You’re So Vain’ established her as one of the defining singer-songwriters of her generation, the voice has inevitably changed, but the intelligence behind it has not. If anything, the years have given Simon another instrument to work with. Every hesitation, crack and shift in emphasis carries meaning.
At 83, Carly Simon isn't trying to sound like the woman she was in 1971. She is singing as the woman she is now, looking backwards, looking around her and, crucially, still looking forward.
Comes in Waves is available to listen to on all major streaming services.
Reviewer: Adrian Cork
On: 15/08/2026
