New Delhi, July 30 -- On the days Carly Simon cannot move, the recording sessions wait. On the days she can, she finishes another track.

August 14, and an album titled Comes in Waves, her first collection of original songs in 18 years. She did not separate the health announcement from the creative one. She presented them as two aspects of the same period of her life.

For an artist whose professional identity has always been inseparable from personal experience, the timing was not incidental. No Secrets, the 1972 album that carried "You're So Vain" to number one, established the posture early - that the personal, rendered with sufficient craft, ceases to be merely personal. She was not writing Sunday's letter to announce a retirement or ...