Carly Simon – Reflections: Carly Simon's Greatest Hits

Why is the vinyl record so hard to find and so expensive, one just sold for close to $500 on eBay?

Not the first multi-label Carly Simon overview, and certainly not the most complete - that honour goes to Rhino's two-disc collection "Anthology" - "Reflections: Carly Simon's Greatest Hits" nevertheless spans three decades and includes all the usual suspects in antichronical order, opening with her career-defining hit, the ubiquitous, unanswered and spellbinding "You're So Vain". Containing twenty cuts culled from all three recording periods, namely the '70s, '80s and '90s, it also makes allowances for her three successful movie soundtrack appearances: "Nobody Does It Better", "Why" and "Let the River Run". Unlike "Anthology", there is a pleasing flow to this haphazardly sequenced disc, with the imperial phase afforded equal weight to the comeback era. Whilst "Anthology" prevailed in terms of representation by devoting a full disc to Simon's timeless '70s recordings, this elitist partiality foredoomed the accompanying disc, which was packed with a surfeit of stylistically disparate material from two eras rather than one. Quite simply, expecting even the initiated to sit through two discs without deriving any pleasure from the experience was to the set's detriment. Sometimes, the prospect of consuming a large amount of unfamiliar material can be a deterrent. Judging by the vast array of single-disc compilations on the market for artists as literate, ambiguous and multifaceted as Simon, it is evident that most prefer a less elaborate and undemanding compendium, and who can blame them?

In the case of compilations, a lack of coherence, convenience and conciseness is simply unforgivable in the era of Spotify, which is where "Reflections" comes in; juxtaposing more acoustic compositions against those with modern production techniques, thus imbuing a selection of Simon’s standards with an unexpected cross-generational appeal and making it the clear winner of the two Rhino offerings. Admittedly, the erratic track positioning akin to a playlist may be too incongruous for some, though anyone unaccustomed to Simon's repository will actually benefit from such incompatibility, even if it means they are unable to process her creative evolution in a balanced, orderly fashion.

Possibly better suited to casual fans not quite invested enough to digest Simon’s entire body of work, the international edition of "Reflections" is ostensibly a condensed and therefore less fatiguing and more consistent configuration of its exhaustive predecessors that ultimately not only functions as a thoroughly compelling listen, but also as an enlightening demonstration of her versatility and songwriting genius.

Rating: 4.5/5

Despite this version not including WHY it's actually better than the international edition and is in chronological order. It even comes right up to the end of the millennium with the last track, AMITY