This page is an introduction to one of the greatest songwriters of all time and one of my very favorites. His work spans from 1964 to the present, contantly evolving, experimenting and blending music from all over the globe into the distinguished sound that belongs to Paul Simon.
Simon has been prolific throughout his career. Here is his discography, in order. Click each cover to pop up a bigger version of each album.
The Solo Years
By Paul ZolloNOTE: The following is part of the booklet that accompanies the Paul Simon 1964-1993 box set. It was skillfully written by my dear old friend, co-songwriter, and fellow bandmember of The Ghosters.
The Songwriter
"An oxymoron to a twelve-year-old—that's a pretty big thing," Paul Simon says. He's remembering what it was about the song "Earth Angel" that so enthralled him as a kid that he tried to share its wonder with his father. "See, Dad," he said, in the living room of their Queens home, circa 1956, "Earth ... angel! An angel from ... earth!" Although his father failed to find any wonder in this play of words, for Paul it was a revelation: the discovery that interesting lyrics — when combined with evocative music — can create something bigger than both parts. "I still feel that is the crucial balance," he says. "Where you put that balance is crucial in defining what kind of song it's going to be."
Paul Simon has been working with this balancing act since the early 60's when he combined his own oxymoron with a beautiful minor-key melody to make "The Sound Of Silence." Since then he has created a body of work that has deepened and defined our decades, continually breaking new ground as it mirrors the dynamics of our times. He's one of our most serious artists and also one of our most popular, and the evolution of his songs has altered songwriting itself, expanding the idea of what a song can be.
Songwriting is a union of disparate elements, a marriage of intellect and emotion. The problems songwriters confront in combining words and music are problems of the heart and the mind, impossible to solve with logic alone. Simon has always been unusually adept at juggling both elements, discovering melodies as inventive and surprising as his lyrics, and words with the same easy flow and organic rhythm of his music. In many of his songs the melody is matched so naturally to the lyric that it's hard to imagine one without the other. Whether it's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "Still Crazy After All These Years" or "Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War," the words and music in these songs come together with a sense of effortlessness and inevitability. It's a quality Simon attains by allowing the songs to gradually emerge and unfold in time. "I'm more interested in what I discover than what I invent," he said. "You don't possess it. You can't control it or dictate to it. You're just waiting. Waiting ... for the show to begin."
Lyrically Simon's songs exist on many levels at once: they're funny and sad, abstract and specific, complex and gracefully simple. He's invented idioms that have been absorbed into our popular culture, such as "50 ways to leave your lover" or "these are the days of miracle and wonder," that possess just the right amount of clarity to capture our collective attention, and mystery to engage our imagination. He's got an ever-expanding capacity for vivid visual writing, easily embodying abstract ideas in concrete images, such as the "wall in China" that runs for a thousand miles in "Something So Right" or the fragile desert rainbow of "Hearts And Bones." Often his songs shift scenes like little movies — in "Hearts And Bones" time flows backwards and forwards as it does in memories and dreams, a cinematic progression that's naturally suited to the timeless essence of songs. "The easier it is for people to understand, the better it is," he explained. "As long as you're not sacrificing intelligence or insight or feeling in order to make it easier. But if you can capture something that you feel is real and express it in a way that a lot of people can understand, that's rare and there's something about that that makes a song have a certain kind of life."
A good example of this kind of life is "Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War," written in 1983. It's a story that i" both physical and spiritual, connecting the portrait of the painter with an ethereal evocation'of beloved doo-wop groups of the past, "the deep forbidden music / they'd been longing for...." This marriage of daylight and darkness is underscored by the haunting beauty of the melody and the distant, spectral harmonies of the actual Harptones. It's a song that is essential Simon—about love, art, America, and music itself, wrapped up with words and music that lift it, like a dream, into the realm of the ages: "for now and ever after as it was before..."
Though he is still considered often to be a folksinger, probably because of frequent proximity to an acoustic guitar, Paul Simon actually writes songs that possess a pianistic sophistication more closely related to George Gershwin than to Woody Guthrie. Simon's work from the early 60's clearly indicates the influence of Dylan and others in the Greenwich Village scene, which he was "hanging around but not penetrating, coming from the disadvantage of Queens." But his music soon took on a life and a style distinctly its own, reflecting a myriad of explorations in time and the world, and delicately balancing the darkness and humor of his lyrics. "By the 70's," he said, "I don't think I was under any other influence. I was pretty much on my own momentum."
To enrich his range of musical expression, Simon delved directly into the heart of indigenous America, making musical odysseys that linked his first love, doo-wop, with gospel. Dixieland, folk, rock & roll, blues, and jazz—all before his famous investigations into the music of Africa and Brazil. "As your vocabulary ot sounds and chords and melodies expands," he said, "you find a clearer way of expressing whatever it is that's on your mind."
Today Simon's mind is focused on sequencing the songs for the second disc of this anthology. It's a sunny Saturday afternoon in Manhattan, less than seven years from the end of the century, and we're sitting in his home among guitars of many colors. In between intervals of tending to his newborn son, he's sharing his thoughts on songs from the middle decade of his career, often picking up one of these guitars to illustrate a musical idea. "This middle period is interesting to me because it's the least looked at," he says. "The Simon And Garfunkel songs have become so institutionalized that everybody knows them. And, of course, the Graceland stuff is also very famous and people know that. So this [middle] period is the one people know least."
This period starts with his second solo album, There Goes Rhymin' Simon in 1973, and extends through Still Crazy After All These Years, 1975, One-Trick Pony, 1980 and Hearts And Bones, 1983. What follows are some random reflections on the explorations and discoveries that led to these songs, as culled from conversations with Paul Simon. (Continued ...)
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