*** Carly Simon

THE BEDROOM TAPES

(Arista)

Carly Simon's first album of new songs since 1994's Letters Never Sent finds her opting for the freeing experience of solitude and the bare necessities in terms of equipment. She recorded this set of classic singer/songwriter pop in the bedroom of her Massachusetts home, and as you might expect, dreams and reminiscences weave throughout. "Whatever became of me," she wonders in the fiddle-accented "Whatever Became of Her," one of several songs that was later fleshed out in a commercial recording studio. Not that The Bedroom Tapes is not all crying into a cup of chamomile tea: in "Actress," Simon takes a tough attitude toward egotistical ambition. And the disc's first single, "So Many Stars," retains its bare-bones structure, highlighting Simon's rich-like-amber voice and her sweet, wry words. In other hands this meditation on how the greatest of passions waxes, wanes, and ultimately dims with time might have come off as sentimental; in Simon's it rings with certain, poignant truth.

-- Linda Laban