In the liner notes of Letters Never Sent, Carly Simon reveals that during her '93 spring cleaning she discovered a box of old, unmailed letters in her closet. "I set a handful of them to music," she explains, "adding a rhyme here, deleting a noun or verb there, and allowing the emotions to find comfortable rhythms." Simon hasn't completely abandoned parallel meter, rhyme schemes, or verse-chorus structure, but she has loosened their grip sufficiently to create a new kind of pop song which has the prose feel and specific focus of a personal letter. Not all these experiments work, but the best of them have the fresh air of something genuinely new. Simon is always quite lucid about who she is addressing--whether it's her mother, a new lover, or an ex-lover--and what she is saying. --Geoffrey Himes