Reflections Carly Simon's Greatest Hits

Album review

In 1995, Arista released the first multi-label Carly Simon retrospective, the triple-disc box set Clouds in My Coffee, and seven years later, Rhino delivered the second, the double-disc Anthology. Two years after that, Arista finally delivered the first single-disc multi-label retrospective, Reflections: Carly Simon's Greatest Hits. Spanning nearly 30 years and featuring 20 songs, the collection has all of the big hits, from such '70s standards as "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," "Anticipation," "The Right Thing to Do," "You're So Vain," "Haven't Got Time for the Pain," and "Nobody Does it Better" to the late-'80s comeback hit "Let the River Run." Certainly, there are some listeners who are looking for a concise career-spanning disc, and for them, this suits the bill very well. The problem is, Simon's late-'80s and '90s work isn't as strong as her '70s recordings, and it accounts for half of this disc; Anthology had a similar situation, with the classic period ending at the conclusion of the first disc, but that division worked better, since it left the listener with one solid disc of '70s material. Here, the two eras are contained on one disc, so the dip in quality is more noticeable, which may make this of less interest to those who only want Simon's best work. Even so, Reflections does what it sets out to do quite well, providing a single-disc overview of Simon's entire career, both for better and worse.

© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo