Carly Simon is coming around again with This Kind of Love, her first album of original music since 2000’s The Bedroom Tapes.

MCT / LYNN GOLDSMITH

Bette Davis is very important to Carly Simon. “The way she talks is so individual. Nobody can imitate her. If I could imitate her, that’s all I would do with my life,” she laughs.

Believe it or not, Bette Davis — or more specifically, a movie “inhabited” by Bette Davis — is an integral part of Carly Simon’s new album, This Kind of Love. So is legendary Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim.

The unlikely proximity these two figures share should not surprise anyone familiar with the trajectory that Carly Simon has followed since her debut in 1970. The Martha’s Vineyard resident has covered both Bob Marley and Stephen Sondheim, recorded the first “standards” album of the rock generation, wrote an opera, inspired Janet Jackson, serenaded James Bond, and created one of the longest-standing riddles in popular culture.

To call the compass points of Simon’s creativity “multi-directional” would be an understatement. The Brazilian flavor of This Kind of Love is yet another stroke in the Pollock-esque portrait of Carly Simon’s career.

There is variety even among the 13 tracks of newly written material, her first such album since The Bedroom Tapes (2000).

No longer pressured to have a hit single, Simon has far more latitude to record what, how, and when she desires without record company interference. Longtime Simon compatriots Jimmy Webb and Frank Filipetti helped shape the album’s aesthetic, craftily maneuvering the different moods and shapes of the songs so that This Kind of Love flows effortlessly from start to finish. It’s easily the most fulfilling album of her 40-year career.

For the purposes of This Kind of Love, Simon employs the Brazilian notion of “saudade,” which symbolizes a kind of sadness inherent even in the happiest moments. The album opens with the title track, a slinky, sensual number that speaks of jealous moons and rolling tides. In a way, it’s the perfect aural complement to the album cover, which has Simon posed and peering from behind a raised arm. Her tale of a late-night rendezvous sways seductively inside the gentle samba. Underscoring the Brazilian influence, the song transitions to a bracing refrain sung in Portuguese that translates to, “Holding me, loving me, harder and harder.” Simon knows how to set a mood.

She always has combed ideas for songs from the most readily accessible source — her life. The dark womb of depression intermittently ensconces Simon. She openly shares how this particular affliction affects her.

“I try to sleep as much as I can because I can’t stand the sensitivity of the outer world,” she says. “I just sleep and that’s the only place I feel at home. Sometimes I think, well, it’s so much like a state of unconsciousness and it’s probably where I’ll go when I do die. I’ll be in that place permanently. I don’t think I’ll be without a consciousness. It will just be a different consciousness on a different plane.”

Simon’s candid self-assessment shapes “In My Dreams,” a song that posits how dreams, in a sense, prepare one for death. Death also informs the waltz-like “Too Soon to Say Goodbye,” a song that Simon dedicated to the late humorist Art Buchwald. Knowing he didn’t have long to live, Buchwald asked Simon to write the song as a kind of eulogy.

“That one just breaks my heart to sing it and to hear it,” says Simon, who was close friends with Buchwald. “He did have four months to be able to hear it. He played it every day. That song means a lot to me.”

A delectable bossa nova surfaces on “When We’re Together.” Written by Sally Taylor (Simon’s daughter), the song made its debut on Taylor’s Tomboy Bride (1998) album.

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were so enamored of the track that they produced it for Taylor’s record. Sally Taylor also is the subject of a song on the album written by her brother, Ben Taylor. The gently undulating “Island” touches on her ability, according to Simon, to hold people at bay.

“It’s that part of her where she can maintain herself as an island and doesn’t need anybody and doesn’t reach out to anybody,” says her mother. “If she’s angry or if she’s angry on behalf of her husband at me, she will hold me away from her for long periods of time and that really hurts. She eventually comes around and she’s the most cuddly bear of all.”

Simon speaks about her children with palpable warmth and affection. “They’re so much my best friends,” she enthuses. “They’re really my confidantes. They’re the people I hang out with who make me laugh the most.”

Indeed, her children have always been by her side. On Simon’s last album, Into White (2007), both Ben and Sally joined their mother on a tender version of their father James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes.”

Both Sally and Ben Taylor possess their parents’ musical gifts. The eldest Taylor child exhibits Simon’s charm.

“The sweetness and the dearness of her is just all over the place. (Sally is) fantastically gifted at so many things. She knows how to knit the most intricate things without a pattern. She knows how to paint without having learned how to paint.” She also knows how to record an album, having released three since 1998.

“Oh my boy/What have you done/Have you gone out surfing/On a frozen sea?” begins “Hold Out Your Heart.” The first couplet references a time when Ben Taylor trotted out to Jones Beach during a blizzard with his surfboard. I ask what traits he and his mother share. Simon explains:

“Ben is such a complicated person. He’s very much like his dad. People who see him for the first time think that he’s like his dad. When they look further they see that he’s probably more like me. He has the ability to comport himself in front of all kinds of people but he’s much more comfortable doing that than James is. James is much shyer.”

Though Simon describes the songs about her children (“Hold Out Your Heart” and “They Just Want You to Be There”) as “vitally important,” “People Say a Lot” is “devastatingly important” to Simon. It’s also the most different-sounding of all the songs on This Kind of Love. She rhymes the lyrics in a sort of jive talk, alluding to the devious intentions of people who will say or do anything to get a job, whether it’s a personal assistant or a politician. In fact, Simon plans to upload a video of “People Say a Lot” on YouTube and replace the lyrics with the speeches of presidential candidates.

Enter Bette Davis.

The story of All About Eve (1950), in which Davis stars as aging Broadway actress Margo Channing, somewhat mirrors the dirty deeds executed by the character in “People Say a Lot.” In the movie, Eve Harrington claws her way into a starring role on Broadway, wreaking havoc in Channing’s life.

Toward the conclusion of “People Say a Lot,” the voice of George Sanders as theatre critic Addison DeWitt appears. At this moment in the movie, he delivers an award to Eve and discovers an aspiring, Eve-Harrington-like young woman named Phoebe in Eve’s hotel room. The dialogue unfolds like this: “Tell me Phoebe, do you want some day to have an award like that of your own?” he asks. “More than anything else in the world,” answers Phoebe. “Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss. Harrington knows all about it,” he replies.

The album was already mastered when Simon realized nobody had asked the movie studio for rights to that clip. . Simon learned she needed clearance from the estate of George Sanders, overseen by anElaine Tully in England.

Simon remembers: “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is dead in the water. What are we going to do?’ A very smart man at my lawyer’s office called the courier in Sussex and said, ‘Do you know of an Elaine Tully?’ The courier said, ‘Yes, in fact she lives just around the block. Do you want me to bicycle (the offer) over?’ He bicycled the offer over and (Elaine) said, ‘We’d be so delighted. We know who Carly Simon is. It’s a great honor for us.’ She just wanted a small amount of money and that was it.”