The 1983 album Paul Simon couldn’t stand working on: “Songs better than the tracks”
Every record Paul Simon ever wrote was always about trying something new.
Simon and Garfunkel had been a great start for his career, but once he refined his chops, he didn’t want to be known as the kid who wrote nothing but folk songs for the rest of his career. He wanted the chance to spread out, but there’s a big difference between songs that were roaring successes and songs that were a bit too ambitious for their own good every single time he wrote one of them.
But for the first few years of his solo career, no one would have really seen an album like Graceland coming. Simon was definitely trying out new spaces within his sound, but especially on that first record, you can still hear the version of the guy who wrote ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. He was still tied to his acoustic guitar half the time, but the next few years would see him trying to work out the bugs of other genres as well.
There Goes Rhymin’ Simon was still a fantastic collection of tunes, but Still Crazy After All These Years had a bit more nuance to the way it was written. He wanted the chance to work with more sophisticated session musicians, and from the moment that people like Steve Gadd and Tony Levin came into the picture, Simon could work on songs that had a bit more of a jazz flavour to them whenever he performed.
But Graceland was always lingering in the back of his mind. That wasn’t the title yet, but he loved the idea of working with people who were outside of his usual wheelhouse, and the concept of rhythm was starting to become a real priority. He didn’t want the same ho-hum percussion setup that everyone else had been using, but just before he started to work with South African musicians, he felt that Hearts and Bones was the first time he really tried to shake things up.
Did it work? Well, a little bit. Hearts and Bones isn’t a terrible record by any means, but you can definitely hear the fragments of the record a little bit more. The songs still sounded amazing whenever Simon sang them, but it was clear that we were listening to him at a distance to a certain degree, and Simon had no problem saying that the record wasn’t fun to return to after a while.
He had bigger plans, and by the time that Graceland came out, Simon felt that Hearts and Bones only looked worse by comparison, saying, “I started to build the albums around rhythms in response to my frustration with the album that preceded Graceland, which was Hearts and Bones.”
Adding, “I felt with that album that I had written some songs that were better than the tracks that went on the album. I couldn’t get things to fit together, so I ended up changing the songs to fit the tracks, and then I thought, ‘My demo was better than this.’”
Granted, that’s a lot easier to say once you have a record like Graceland under your belt. Simon was never going to reach the same heights as that album again, but when you look at the kind of songs that he was making on Hearts and Bones, it was clearly a test run for what he had been trying to do on the next record, even if it does have some great songs sprinkled throughout like ‘The Late Great Johnny Ace’.
Simon hadn’t started to slip as a writer by any means, but anyone else in his position would have the moment where things started to stagnate a little bit. He didn’t want to lose the momentum that he already had, and Graceland was the one opportunity he had to correct all of the mistakes that he made on this record.
