Carly was the first to do the standards

Today you have every pop star doing a standard album of classic
songs. Carly Simon was the first. She recorded "Torch" in 1981
and rleased a beautiful CD. The album was recorded after the
breakup of her marriage to James Taylor. If you look close on
the album cover she is holding on to a male about the height
of James Taylor. She sings these songs beautifully and her
choice of material is excellent. Every song is perfect and
completes the theme of the CD. Yes Carly recorded "Torch"
before Linda Ronstadt did "What's New", or Rod Stewart,
Michael Bolton, and now Cyndi Lauper. I think you will find
the original is always the best because you don't have to
stand up to someone else's work. Carly did it first.

Classic Torch at its Slit-Your-Wrists Best

At first glance Carly Simon would seem an unlikely talent for a collection of 20th Century pop classics--her unique vocals, that mix the quality of speech with music, would seem at odds with the strictness of the material. But instead of approaching the music with the full orchestrations of Bette Midler or Linda Ronstadt, she offers a stripped down interpretation, and the resulting music has the feel of a smoky, almost-empty nightclub, where the singer sits on a stool surrounded by a bare-bones band and sings not for you, but very powerfully for herself.

1981's TORCH is an incredible recording. Opening with "Blue on Blue" and continuing through such classics as "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good," "Body and Soul," and "Hurt," Simon demonstrates a range of emotion that transcends her more typical off-the-cuff sound, a combination of fire and ice that recalls the great jazz singers of the 1940s and 1950s but which somehow never sounds less than absolutely contemporary. This is classic torch at its slit-your-wrists best, a bonfire of dying emotions.

It is impossible to select a favorite from the material Simon offers on this recording, but if I were pressed, I would likely pick the closing "Not a Day Goes By"--curiously, the only greatly then-contemporary piece in the collection, written by Broadway's Stephen Sondheim for the play MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. Again, Simon and Sondheim are not a combination that you would think would work... but with this recording Simon makes it her own, and it is difficult to imagine any other singer who could best her. Strongly recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

The Original Standards Album - Buy This!!

Before Linda Ronstadt, Patti Austin or (ugh!) Rod Stewart mined the "Great American Songbook" for inspiration, there was Carly Simon's "Torch." A gutsy move, coming right off her hit single "Jesse" and album "Come Upstairs" for a new label, "Torch" still stands above all the others that came after (including two other Carly Simon standards albums, "My Romance" and "Film Noir").



Simon's voice has an inherent melancholy, and this combined with her emotional rawness following her divorce from James Taylor created an immediacy of interpretation that couldn't be fabricated. Carly's reading of Hoagy Carmichael's "I Get Along Without You Very Well" or her own composition "From The Heart" or Rodgers & Hart's "Spring Is Here" will break your heart with their honesty. Mike Mainieri's production (in my opinion, he was her most sympathetic and adventurous producer) approaches each song with the respect of a classic but with the freshness of an innovative visionary. This may sound heavy-handed for a pop album, but such is this album's loveliness.



Try this out - listen to the above mentioned songs, plus the fabulously understated "I'll Be Around" - you'll see what I mean. Future standards albums failed to capture the immediacy of this one, mostly because Carly's emotional fragility of the time resulted in an album her fans could relate to unlike any other.