As the social queen of East Coast pop-rock, Carly Simon can be counted on to put out well-tailored product that defines "class" (lots of money tastefully spent) to the industryites and consumers who regard the pop world as a toney horse race. With their tense fake-natural glamor, Simon's albums amount to aural fashion shows. Each year, an expensive name producer is engaged to design a collection that cautiously incorporates the latest trends and squeezes one or two hits out of the star's new material, thus validating her writing talents and recertifying her first-lady status commercially. (p. 50)

I've long thought that if Simon would scrap all but the best of her own songs and concentrate on singing other people's material, she might actually come up with a great album, instead of the tasteful teases we've grown used to.

Spy, Simon's latest, is no breakthrough…. [It's] typical Carly Simon—trendy-sexy with a soupçon of intellectual vigor. There are no killer cuts like "You're So Vain" or "You Belong to Me" and no personal narratives as interesting as the best songs on Another Passenger, the album that falsely signaled a break-through in Simon's writing. The conflict between Simon's arty aspirations and her rock & roll drive is, if anything, more glaring than ever.

Spy takes its title from an Anais Nin quote, and most of its material touches on the war between the sexes. But when Simon tries to be serious, she becomes impenetrable. The album's big shot at "art" is a klunking eight-and-a-half-minute pop-jazz-classical fusion called "Memorial Day" that brushes more grooves than the rest of the album put together without actually settling into any of them. It's as rambling and nondescript as Joni Mitchell's "Paprika Plains," which might have been a model. The content of the text—a girl in a limo finds herself in a desert wilderness witnessing a primal sexual battle—is as dull as its versification. Dream sequences in art are usually cheap substitutes for direct self-expression, and this one is typical.

Spy's better moments are its lighter ones. In "Vengeance," Simon titillatingly banters with a hot cop…. The most arresting lyric, "We're So Close," describes the frustration of loving someone who forestalls communication by saying things like "in speaking one can be so false." There are hints of real rage in this song, but not enough to cut beneath it's glossy easy-listening surface; as in most of Simon's other semi-autobiographical outpourings, the confessional impulse is muted by an evasive decorousness. So Spy remains a pleasant album; the listening is painless at best, the hooks catchy, and the star still teasingly unavailable. (p. 56)