Carly Simon Serenades Her Way Into the Top 10 With New Album  7/28/05

Pop Music Icon's 'Moonlight Serenade' Debuts at #7 on Billboard Top 200 Best-Selling Albums Chart - New Collection of Romantic Standards is Artist's Highest Charting Album in the SoundScan Era

NEW YORK, July 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Pop music legend Carly Simon is back on the nation's Top 10 as Moonlight Serenade, her breathtaking new album of romantic standards, debuts at #7 on the Billboard Top 200 best-selling albums chart.

Released on July 19, Moonlight Serenade, Carly Simon's first album for Columbia Records, is the highest-charting debut on this week's Top 200 chart by any solo musical artist.

With first week's sales of some 58,000 pieces (and approximately 40% coming from DualDisc sales), Moonlight Serenade is already Carly Simon's highest-charting album of the SoundScan era and is the artist's first album to hit the Top 10 since 1978's Boys In The Trees.

An essential new chapter in the Carly Simon canon, Moonlight Serenade has become one of the artist's three highest-charting albums to-date -- following No Secrets (#1, 1973) and Hotcakes (#3, 1974) -- and joins Playing Possum (#10, 1975) and Boys In The Trees (#10, 1978) as one of her five Top 10 successes.

"Ms. Simon still possesses one of pop music's friendliest and most intelligent voices," wrote Stephen Holden in The New York Times (July 19, 2005), "one that expresses a lot more feeling than the bratty tough-girl shout that dominates female pop singing today."

"Simon's romance with traditional pop music began long before other baby-boomer pop stars started jumping on the standards bandwagon," observed Elysa Gardner in her three-star review of Moonlight Serenade in USA Today (July 19, 2005). "Here, the singer lends her instantly recognizable alto to affectionate readings of pre-rock classics such as 'In the Still of the Night,' 'Where or When,' and 'I Only Have Eyes for You.' Old collaborator Richard Perry's robust but never overzealous production adds substance in lieu of icing, setting these gems with a mix of reverence and knowing that mirrors and enhances Simon's own approach."

Moonlight Serenade reunited Carly Simon with the legendary producer Richard Perry, who first worked with Carly on her career-defining #1 breakthrough masterpiece, No Secrets, in 1972. The pair has gone on to enjoy a creative partnership which has lasted over the decades, notably producing Carly's hit albums Hotcakes (1974) and Playing Possum (1975). Together, the pair has created such classic hits as "You're So Vain," "Mockingbird," "The Right Thing To Do," and "Haven't Got Time For The Pain" as well as "Nobody Does It Better" as featured in the 1977 James Bond film, "The Spy Who Loved Me."

Recorded over a four month period in late 2004-early 2005, Moonlight Serenade showcases Carly Simon's dusky and sensual vocal stylings on eleven romantic standards penned by some of the world's greatest songwriters including Glenn Miller, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II, George & Ira Gershwin, and Howard Dietz & Arthur Schwartz.

Moonlight Serenade fulfills the aesthetic promise Carly first made with 1981's Torch, the groundbreaking album of pre-rock and non-rock cover songs that foreshadowed the trend of contemporary singers performing pop standards. She recorded her second album of pop standards, My Romance, in 1990, and a third, Film Noir, with producer Jimmy Webb in 1997.

The DualDisc edition of Moonlight Serenade features the full album on the audio-only side while the DVD side includes the album in its entirety as well as exclusive new footage of Carly at-home and a "making of the album" documentary including in-the-studio footage, photos, and interviews with Carly Simon and Richard Perry.