If there are traces of an emerging, strong female consciousness on [Anticipation], they appear as much in [Carly Simon's] attitude to her role as a musician and singer as in the music itself. The music of Anticipation consists of starkly frank and carefully manicured songs about the vagaries of the male/female saga. They are a strange set of love songs, more like a cycle of the wide range of the emotional pulls and tugs that love connotes. She sings sometimes as an acute observer of the life conditions of a fellow human, sometimes as an equal partner in a shattered affair, sometimes as a bemused annotater of losing battles and the highly-charged moment flying away.

The title song is the first cut. "Anticipation" is a spirited examination of the tensions involved in a burgeoning romantic situation in which nobody has any idea of what's going on or what's going to happen….

"Legend in Your Own Time" is about anyone who has achieved a measure of fame and has been working at it since their youth. That the most famous folks are often the loneliest is one of the tiredest truisms in show-biz, but Carly convinces the listener that her story is a personal one rather than a generalization. "Our First Day Together" is a re-creation of just that. It's a quiet song, lovely and quite enigmatic….

"The Garden" and "Three Days" are a pair of disparate love songs, the first an image-filled idealization, the second a lovely, wistful realization of a pair of musicians in love, people who have to travel away from each other after three shared days of intensity….

I don't think Carly Simon wants anything to do with her image as the Woman of the Future. All she is really is a maturing musician who is a woman and who is making excellent music, and that should be enough for anyone. Forget the labels, listen to the music.