Cool album!

This album,Carly Simon's fourth,spawned two Top 20 hits,HAVEN'T GOT TIME FOR THE PAIN and MOCKINGBIRD,a duet with her then-husband James Taylor. Those songs appeared on the 1975 compilation THE BEST OF CARLY SIMON. The other songs are good. Following this album would be PLAYING POSSUM,then TBOCS. After the release of NO SECRETS,Simon's only #1 album released in 1972,she would continue to have Top 20 hits. But none of her subsequent albums made it to the #1 position,not even 1987's COMING AROUND AGAIN on the Arista label.

Solid pleasures and desires

I have been trying to do too much intellectually, and as I drop back to where my life is emotionally, this album is one that is worth every minute that it takes to listen to it. I am actually glad James Taylor got to do so much on this album, even if the song "Forever My Love," which James Taylor gets credit for writing with Carly Simon, was supposed to rhyme with:

I'm lookin' forward to looking back
From further on down the track
Together in fact
Forever my love, my love.

That doesn't shift the rhyme from the end to the beginning of the last two lines, but close enoungh. Recordings last longer now than mere incidents of sentimentality, and modern people have to be ready for jumps like the lines in "Mockingbird" by Inez and Charlie Foxx:

"I'm gonna get myself a better way
I might rise above, I might go below
Ride with the tide and go with the flow"

There are ten musicians for that song, including piano and organ by Dr. John, and anyone who would like to see some bigger stars might look for the version in the movie "No Nukes!" which featured a live performance with Carly Simon in a jumpsuit that will always be one of my favorite memories of Carly Simon.

For purely personal memories, I was most impressed by Carly Simon's song "Older Sister." It starts with young sibling rivalry, "She goes to bed an hour later than I do," but the final contrast, of sororities and model T's "While I wear her last year's threads with patches and stitches and a turned up hem" is almost quaint enough now to be beyond nostalgia.

The tuba is great in "Hotcakes" and I don't see any credit to anyone for writing that song, except "Horns arr. and cond. by James Taylor." When the song was at the end of side 1 on a record, the "Now wait, now flip it" was exactly the right cue for being able to turn the record over and hear "Misfit." The song begins with Carly playing a few chords on a piano before she starts singing her devastating portrait of all the easy failures that are more likely in an overly populated but declining society. Calling it "Misfit" does not justly reveal how well it applies to fields like information technology, in which people are looking for the get rich schemes that might work for enough of a life to finance healthcare benefits until Medicare kicks in. Economics has become like the diamond ring that won't shine in "Mockingbird," and "if that better way ain't so" must be for most people about the only thing sure to happen sooner or later. The moment of grace is in "Misfit" :

"Not every man was born with a boat to catch."

UNDER-RATED CLASSIC SIMON ALBUM!

HOTCAKES IS BY FAR ONE OF CARLY SIMON'S BEST AND POSSIBLY MOST UNIFORM ALBUMS IN HER LONG, ILLUSTRIOUS CAREER. FROM THE OPENING SONG "SAFE & SOUND" TO THE CLASSIC CLOSING SONG OF "HAVEN'T GOT TIME FOR THE PAIN", SIMON SEEMS TO MAINTAIN A MATURE ATTITUDE YET SLIP IN SOME OF HER TRADEMARK KOOKINESS FOR GOOD MEASURE. "FOREVER MY LOVE" AND "JUST NOT TRUE" ARE MY FAVORITE SONGS ON THE ALBUM (POSSIBLY OF SIMON'S WHOLE CAREER). WHILE SOME PEOPLE DON'T SEE THIS RECORD AS BEING AS GOOD AS NO SECRETS (CLASSIC, ALSO MY FAVORITE ALBUM OF HERS)I TEND TO SEE IT AS A WORTHY FOLLOW-UP TO THAT HUGELY SUCCESSFUL ALBUM. AND ALL EXCEPT FOR THE SILLY, BORDERLINE STUPIDITY OF THE TITLE SONG, THIS ALBUM, WITHOUT QUESTION, BELONGS IN EVERY CARLY SIMON FAN'S COLLECTION.