Review: Carly Simon's 'Comes in Waves' Sifts Love and Loss

Carly Simon's new album "Comes in Waves" — her first collection of original songs in nearly 20 years — arrives in the aftermath of her announcement last month that she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease while making the record and also had surgery to remove a cancerous skin growth.

The album plays less like an ending than a continuation of the themes that have defined Simon's career: yearning, discontent, desire, uncertainty, her marriage to James Taylor and the loss of her father, the publisher Richard Simon, who died when she was in her teens.

"Maybe I never loved you / But anyway, I thought I did / I married you, we had a kid," she sings in a ballad you could imagine addressed to Taylor. "And maybe you never loved me / Although God knows you said you did."

The lead track and first single, "Howl," is a midtempo rocker addressed to a heartbroken friend — or perhaps to herself — whom Simon urges to "Get it out of your system / Bang your fists and beat your brow."

From there the songs dramatize the album's title, with Simon's mood shifting from defiance to regret to melancholy to resolve and a willingness to try again. The cycle is cushioned, to a fault, by the literal-minded production and arrangements of David Spencer, Frank Filipetti and her son Ben Taylor, among others.

The record includes a remaster of Simon's decades-old political song "Share the End" and echoes earlier work. "Maybe I Never Loved You," inspired by the late playwright Tim Mayer, recalls "I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)," the Hoagy Carmichael standard she covered on 1981's "Torch." "The Father-Daughter Dance" suggests the pain of "Embrace Me, You Child," her early-1970s ballad about her father.

Elsewhere Simon teases courtship on "Peaches," celebrates parenthood on "Mother of Pearl," a tribute to daughter Sally Taylor, and savors life's "wild ride" on "Love the Way I Do." The catchiest song is by a departed friend, the late Judy Belushi: "Four in the Morning," a tiptoeing portrait of an unhappy wife slipping away from her snoring husband.

Simon, who turned 83 this year, doesn't hit all the notes of her best-known records, but she has lost none of her gift for taking hold of a melody and putting her whole self into the words. Longtime fans are the most likely to enjoy catching up with her; others may feel they had to be there.

Three stars out of five.