Carly Simon [is] a very beautiful, if very different, album….

[Carly's] style is difficult to pin down. She is a Sarah Lawrence graduate and she unabashedly writes like one. Much more than Randy Newman, who was once carelessly labelled "the king of the suburban blues," Carly writes songs dedicated to the proposition that the rich, the well-born and the college-educated often find themselves in the highest dues-paying brackets. Some of the songs on this album sound like [John] Updike or [J. D.] Salinger short stories set to music.

These are personal songs written by a woman caught in a classic post-graduation bind: she has a fierce desire for independence; at the same time, frightened of loneliness, she longs for the security of marriage. In song after song, she gives in and opts for marriage, sometimes to find that her man has lost patience and split….

The loneliness of...