1974 · Behind the Songs
Healing on a deadline.
Hotcakes (1974) was made in a hurry — Simon cut the album quickly in late 1973 while expecting her first child — and its lead single sounds like it. Co-written with Jacob Brackman and produced by Richard Perry, “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” is a brisk, string-lifted farewell to heartache: a woman deciding, mid-song, that suffering is a waste of a good day. It returned Simon to the Top 20, reaching No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The record’s charm is its efficiency — no wasted motion, no wallowing, pain dismissed with a shrug and a melody that keeps moving forward. Between the wedding-day doubts of her early hits and the disco experiments still to come, it captures Simon at her most matter-of-fact: the diary entry as self-prescription.