Carly Simon – Comes in Waves

Review by

Tom Parmiter

Tom is a UK-based music writer who first contributed to No Ripcord in 2018.

A few short months after Paul McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane, a fellow songwriting titan of the same generation, the indomitable Carly Simon, is back with her twenty-fourth studio album—released 55 years after her self-titled debut. 

Comes in Waves arrives 18 years after her last studio album, Never Been Gone. It bursts into life with “Howl,” a mini-demonstration of how to build effectively from intro to chorus, with a buoyant mix that helps its cause. The gears are then shifted for one of the album’s highlights, the gorgeous-sounding “Maybe I Never Loved You,” with voice, piano and strings creating an effortless lilt. As is evident across these tracks, Simon occasionally opts for chords and arrangements many modern pop acts rarely see cause to use, and this song is all the more powerful for it.

You hear similarly sharp writing in the bridge to “Love Has No Ending,” which alternates between out-and-out folk and dreamy, ambient-feeling choruses. This eventually builds into a powerful repeated outro that ratchets up the atmosphere, a structure shared equally successfully with “Mother Of Pearl,” which again takes a scenic melodic route during its curious bridge.

There are excursions into different sounds and tempos. “Peaches” is one such collective oddity, with eighties-sounding drum machine rhythms and synths colliding with a very dry guitar sound and fruity lyrics. “Four In the Morning” also adopts this template when the outro takes an unexpected free-form ambient turn. Neither feels as sure-footed as the largely percussion-free efforts previously mentioned. Placed mid-record, “Slowly” is a welcome, subtle tonal shift to these and other songs. Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider features amid a very pretty harmonised vocal line, its lyric wistful and calling for patience.

Lyrically, there is a fair amount of emotive heft across this record. The traditional ballad “The More I Look For You” laments a loved one who has either been lost or is changing in front of the protagonist, succumbing to a full-blown romantic string arrangement at the bridge. “The Father Daughter Dance” is also particularly striking, where the bridge unexpectedly details young men trying to take the father’s place in the narrator’s life.

Comes in Waves is a collection that emphasises Simon’s sixty-plus-year career with emotional depth and many high-water marks. Interestingly, a 2025 remaster of “Share The End” near the end of the album only adds to this—the full power and timbre of Simon’s young voice contrasting very effectively with her current vocals. You could forgive artists of such calibre and longevity for slowing or stopping altogether with new music. But as with McCartney, if anything, Simon’s latest is a welcome, timely reminder that intelligent pop songwriting not only prevails, but it is also a valuable yardstick for up-and-coming acts.

Comes In Waves is out now via Iris.