Paul Simon hears voices. Or more specifically one voice, it’s the voice that gave him the phrase “so beautiful or so what.” A few years ago it became the title song of his most recent album. It’s the voice that gave him other phrases now deeply woven into the fabric of our culture, such as “Sound of Silence,” “Still Crazy After All These Years,” “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” None of these were contrived, all were ideas that simply arrived, sometimes when he was at his guitar, other times when he wasn’t. But like any savvy songwriter, he knows it’s a good idea to listen when the voice speaks and maybe jot it down.
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Years ago, when I first interviewed him, Simon attempted to explain this mysterious process of listening. These days, he’s quicker to embrace the mystery and leave the question of how his songs get written unanswered. (Will we all be received in Graceland? And just what was it that the mama saw?)
“Much of songwriting is simply a mystery,” he says, from a Beverly Hills hotel room the morning after three sold-out shows in Hollywood. But what isn’t a mystery is that Paul Simon is an ongoing creative phenomenon, an American treasure as significant to the art of songwriting as Cole Porter or Irving Berlin was in their day, a songwriter who continues to break new ground in an art form that has been profoundly impacted by his work. Unlike many of his peers who seem creatively disengaged, Simon has entered his 70th year as exultant about songwriting and record-making as ever.
Rather than traveling around the globe to stir exotic sounds into the mix, this time around on So Beautiful or So What, he’s traveled into the past. “Love Is Eternal Sacred Light,” boasts a great locomotive-charged harmonica exhortation by none other than Sunny Terry, sampled from his 1938 “Train Whistle Blues,” while “Getting Ready for Christmas Day” is woven lovingly around samples of a 1941 sermon delivered with fire and brimstone by the Reverend J.M. Gates and congregation. Rather than ignore the potential of digital innovations such as loops and samples, he embraces them.
Today, he’s concerned about a sore throat and drinking lots of water and herbal tea so as to be in good voice for tonight’s show near San Diego. “I had some coffee yesterday,” he says, “and that might be the problem.” A friend worries aloud that Donald Trump is making waves, which Simon dismisses like a bad joke: “Nobody’s listening.”
He seems happy, relaxed, and very much in love with his wife of many years, Edie Brickell, and their children. It’s a sense of spiritual harmony that permeates all of So Beautiful or So What, and is crystallized in the album’s stirring centerpiece “Love and Hard Times”: Thank God I found you in time. Thank God I found you…
American Songwriter: In 1992, you told me you were more interested in what you discovered than what you invent. Is that still the case?
Paul Simon: Yeah, it’s like you’re wandering down a path and you don’t know what the destination is. Somewhere toward the end, you can sort of see what the destination is and you can understand what the journey is about. At which point, if I want, I can go alter some of the things that occurred to set it up. But usually I don’t. It usually just goes along as a story that I’m telling and I’m a listener, and at a certain point I say, “Oh, that’s what it’s about.”
But that part of the process, I really can’t explain it. I don’t really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden an idea comes from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might make and I can try a couple of different choices and see which one feels right and then continue the song to see where it goes.
AS: Do you give a lot of thought to the meaning?
PS: No. The only thought that I give to it is: “Is that something that I really believe?” It doesn’t have to be insightful or anything. It just has to be not a lie. I can’t say, “I’m setting out to write a really deep, philosophical song.” I would never say that, I have no idea.
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And most of the time, the songs have jokes in them, little sarcastic things, or purposely kitsch or something. So that’s going along with a story, like I do in life, just talking to myself and making fun of stuff and laughing at stuff that’s serious. And sometimes it’s a good idea to put the laughing into the songs. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s all right just to be serious. But most of the songs have some kind of joke in them.
AS: Besides the humor, one of the constants in these songs is God and spirituality. Why?
PS: I don’t know. There was just a piece on [Christian Today], and the writer [Ben Witherington] said, “Paul is writing God’s music. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing now. I don’t think he’s aware that he’s a vessel for this.” So I found that very intriguing.
AS: Is it accurate?
PS: I really don’t know. I really don’t know what exactly all the songs mean. Sometimes other people have meanings and when I hear them, I think, “That’s really a better meaning than I thought and perfectly valid given the words that exist.” So part of what makes a song really good is that people take in different meanings, and they apply them and they might be more powerful than the ones I’m thinking.
AS: You’ve always done that.
PS: It’s just a natural thing. I’m not being purposely vague, but that seems to be true. Not just of me, but of a lot of songs where they turn out to mean something really powerful, that wasn’t meant to be.
AS: “Mother and Child Reunion” is like that.
PS: Yeah, “Mother and Child Reunion” is ambiguous enough that you could think a lot of different things with that.
AS: “Questions for the Angels” is that like that. Do you recall where the opening came from?
PS: That’s one of those first lines that just popped in my head—A pilgrim on a pilgrimage walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. I have no idea why that came to me or what I was thinking about. But if a song begins with somebody setting out on a journey, that’s a perfect metaphor for what the song is trying to do anyway.
AS: What was the writing process like? Did you write every day?
PS: In a way. But it’s not like I sit down at my desk and do that. I don’t really like to write at a desk, I like to write when driving in a car.
AS: With the track going?
PS: Yeah. Which is why I am one of the guys you want to avoid when you’re on the road [laughs]. I’m more listening to the track than I am paying attention to driving. I like the car because you’re passive, stuff is passing. You can look and things are going on. You get bored and you turn it off and you turn on a baseball game or something.
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Once you’re working on it, you’re working on it all the time, and sometimes stuff will come in the middle of the night in a dream or something. Your mind is working on it all the time.
AS: Do you remember writing “So Beautiful or So What”?
PS: I had the title very early. Way before, years before, I had that song. I had written down a sentence, “Everything is either so beautiful or so what.” There was a lot of luck in this album. I come up with the last song, and this phrase, which I like, it fits. I can call it that … and then I thought that’s a good title for the album. It does sum up the album.
AS: It has an intricate rhyme scheme; How do you craft something like that without it seeming contrived?
PS: There’s a significant part of writing songs that I have no logical explanation for, it just seems to be something that comes from me. And I sort of recognize it as opposed to shaping it. Oh, that’s a good idea, that’s a good line. I wonder where I can use that. And when you get into a rhyme group like ‘not,’ you got a lot of rhymes, you got a lot of choices. The more you do it, the luckier you get. All I’ve ever done is write songs and make records. Now, it’s been a long time and I’ve had a lot of experience at it.
AS: The last verse describes the assassination of Martin Luther King. And yet the song isn’t about Dr. King.
PS: No, but he’s the embodiment of that choice, so beautiful or so what? He was a person who clearly said we have the potential to be living in a paradise, or we have a potential to live in hell. I thought that the song was a little bit unfocused until that came about.
AS: “The Boy in the Bubble” is amazing live.
PS: That’s a song that I wrote—completely—and didn’t like it at all and threw the whole thing out and said, “That’s awful.” And then rewrote it as “The Boy in the Bubble.”
AS: Do you remember the original words?
PS: No. It would be interesting to see. I just said, you know, this is a great track but this lyric, I don’t believe it. It sounds like I’m trying to say something, instead of it naturally coming out of me, like I was saying something that I already knew. Anyway, I can’t remember what it was and either I threw it all out or I threw 90 percent of it out, and kept a line or two. That’s happened a couple of times to me, not too often, but a couple of times. Very aggravating when it does happen.
AS: You and Dylan went on tour together in 1999; you each did sets and then you sang a few together. How was that for you— to sing with him?
PS: Fun [laughs]. And funny.
AS: Funny?
PS: Yeah. He doesn’t sing the same thing twice, you know? So if my job is to sing harmony, I don’t know where he’s going to be.
AS: A challenge others have had. Like Joan Baez.
PS: Yeah, but I think it’s sort of fun that both of us were standing up there singing together.
AS: Your language in songs has always been smooth and polished. Is that the result of a lot of revision?
PS: I don’t have a clear picture in my mind of how that works. The words come. Usually it’s a long time before they come. And then when they start to come, it doesn’t take so long for it to be finished. It takes a long time to begin. And then it sort of gets finished.
Sometimes I’ll be stuck on a verse, or some aspect of the song. Could be for a long time. “Love and Hard Times” took a long time.
AS: A miraculous song.
PS: Thank you. I had the opening line God and his only son, which I thought, that’s got to be a good opening line for me. What am I going to do with it? It’s pretty far away from home for me. But otherwise, I didn’t have the story or anything.
AS: Generally, we think of songs as confessional, about the songwriter, or a story song about someone or something else. Yet “Love and Hard Times” is both, and shifts cinematically from one scene into another.
PS: Yeah, that’s right, it shifts. Because once the first two verses were over, and I’d finished that part of the story, I realized that the rest of the song was going to be straight-ahead love song. There was enough cynicism in the first two verses and now I didn’t really need to go any further, and now the rest had to be pure love song. So in a sense, it is cinematic in that it now changes to another story.
AS: You wrote that song and others using your original method of writing with a guitar, as opposed to writing to tracks. How did that feel?
PS: A little bit awkward at first. And then, I was a little bit apprehensive about whether I could do it. “Love and Hard Times” is a pretty complex structure for a song. It has different parts and changes keys several times. But nevertheless, it is a symmetrical structure. And when I realized, well, of course I can do this. And it’s just a question of patience.
AS: You thank the composer Philip Glass for helping you get out of “harmonic tangles,” you would somehow “miscreate” on the album. Was that about “Love and Hard Times”?
PS: Could have been about “Love and Hard Times.” Sometimes I’ll just ask him about a modulation and how to think about that, what notes I might want to have to solve the problem of it. Eventually I’d figure it out. But with Philip, he’s like Google [laughs]. You ask Philip, you pretty much get a quick answer. Unless he decides it would be better for me to just work it out. In which case, he says, “Hmm. I don’t know.” He knows [laughs].
AS: Patti Smith told us she writes poems for herself, but songs are for the whole world, do you feel that?
PS: No, I don’t think, “This is something that the whole world will hear.” And I don’t think I ever did. Most of the time, when I had hits as a soloist—maybe not so much with Simon and Garfunkel— I was surprised they were hits. I didn’t know what the hits were. I never thought that “Love’s Me Like a Rock” was going to be a hit, or “Mother and Child Reunion,” or “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” They didn’t sound like what the hits sounded like at the time. Radio was more open to things that weren’t exactly what every other hit was.
AS: People pick up on your lines in a way they don’t with most songs, it seems.
PS: I really put the lyrics up front. I don’t really get it why people bury their lyrics. Especially if they have something to say. Like Radiohead, I can’t hear the lyrics when I first put the record on. I think, these are guys who have something to say, why stick it there in the track where I’m kind of straining to hear what you have to say? But, you know, whatever, everybody has a different aesthetic. I put mine way out in front. And that’s sort of part of my sound.
AS: Interesting you say that they are songs and not poems, they are meant to be heard.
PS: Yeah. Well, I mean, sometimes they have elements that could be shared with poetry. But they’re not poems. They’re lyrics. They’re meant to be sung. They come out of the rhythm of the music, as opposed to creating your own rhythm of the words.
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And there’s much more use of cliché in songwriting than there is in poetry because a song is going at a certain tempo and it’s going fast, and if you miss a line, you missed it. But when you’re reading poetry, you read it at a much slower pace. So the lines can be much more dense, and have words that are not usually in a speaking vocabulary, and which carry multiple meanings, because you can slow it down so you can get it. But in a song, it’s clocking along, and if you missed it, it’s gone. And if you miss enough of it, well, the song is gone, and you sort of lose interest.
AS: In “Love and Blessings” you have a wonderful verse, If the summer kept a secret, it was heaven’s lack of rain, which to me seems to be about global warming. But you don’t do it too overtly.
PS: I don’t want to be too preachy. I don’t think anybody really needs to be preached to and people resent it if they think that you’re preaching to them and I think I would resent it. I don’t need to be told things that I know, or lectured, or any of that stuff. So it’s just a comment on what’s going on. It doesn’t tell you a moral judgment. It assumes that you have already taken the issue into account and you have an opinion.
AS: Was “Getting Ready for Christmas Day” a track-first song?
PS: Track first, yeah. I heard the sermon before making the track, but I didn’t have anything but a liking for that sermon. I made the track, the guitars and all that first. Then I said, “Let’s put this sermon on and see if that sermon works.” As soon as it was there, it was really compelling. If I were just a producer, I would have said, “Just leave that with the track and the sermon, that’s fine, no need to do anything else.” But as a songwriter who’s making a record, I have to figure out how to get me into the track [laughs]. I didn’t have the idea of using the sermon in anything til I made that track.
AS: His voice works so perfectly in A major, where it is.
PS: Yeah, it does. There’s a lot of good luck on this album.
AS: Do you think it’s just luck?
PS: Yeah, that was luck. That his voice fit perfectly and seems to be in the right key, and the right tempo. It just sort of laid right in. The tricky part was to write a song that went around the sermon.
AS: I think many would ascribe it to more than luck, to God, or providence.
PS: You could, you know. Or the harder you work, the luckier you get. But I look at it as luck.
AS: It’s obvious you’re still aiming high as ever in your work, and getting there, whereas many of your peers seem disengaged.
PS: Well, I don’t know. Leonard Cohen’s doing pretty well at 70. And Randy Newman’s last album, Harps and Angels—fabulous. Really great work. He’s definitely at the peak of his powers.
The creative impulse is varied. Paul McCartney’s writing a ballet. Neil Young is very involved in film. Bob [Dylan] paints. He makes these incredible iron gates. Really beautiful, where he wields things together. So they’re very creative. It may be—and this is pure speculation—because the record business changed so much and kind of imploded and evaporated, it might be that there’s not so much of an incentive to go make a record. But as far as I’m concerned, I feel like it doesn’t really matter what happens with the record business, because I’m just following the path that I set out on in the ’60s. And I’m curious to see where it leads. I don’t expect it, really, to lead to big commercial success. But I’m very curious to see where it will take me. And I’m not particularly creative in any other area [laughs]. You know, I can’t paint, or make gates or make ballets, or films or any of that. This is all I do.
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2011 issue of American Songwriter Magazine
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