The one album Paul Simon said outshined ‘Graceland’
The quality of music that Paul Simon doesn’t even seem fair to most modern songwriters.
He was always looking to keep woodshedding on every record he made, and even when he was trying out something completely different, it was no sweat for him to take the basis of what he was on, shift it in the opposite direction, and still manage to make one of the greatest records that anyone had ever come up with. But even with the acknowledged masterpieces, he knew that some records could hold their own next to his most celebrated work.
But even when picking out the best albums Simon ever made, it’s hard to narrow down what kind of record is his best. Simon and Garfunkel are considered one of the untouchable periods of his life for a reason, but when looking at his solo outings, his early records, like Still Crazy After All These Years, were the most natural transition that anyone could have asked for. He was growing into a seasoned veteran, and that meant working with some of the best in the session world to get to where he needed to be.
Then again, most of Simon’s career can be divided between two periods: before Graceland and after Graceland. Despite working with South African musicians being considered a bit controversial at the time, you can hardly blame him for working with them when the songs sounded as good as ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ or ‘The Boy in the Bubble’.
For any other artist, this would be the album that would solidify you in the musical heavens, but Simon wasn’t looking to recreate that magic every time he made a record. He was a true musician, and he was going to toy with everything he could to get the best sound he heard in his head, and when looking back on his career, he was grateful to see that people were going back to listen to tracks off of records like The Rhythm of the Saints a lot more.
While nothing can take away from his classic material, Simon felt that there were pieces of Saints that managed to give even his magnum opus a run for its money, saying, “Since the arc of my career is so varied and long, it’s an interesting trip to get on–to see what happened on one album leading to the other. The emergence of the Rhythm of the Saints as an album people listen to even more than Graceland – that’s pretty new – because when it came out, it was a hit, but people were slightly disappointed. They liked Graceland more, but now it seems to me people like Rhythm Of The Saints better.”
But that also might come from a lot of people hearing Graceland over and over again as well. There’s no real way to get tired of an album if it never truly goes away, and while overplay shouldn’t diminish the songs from being outright classics, Rhythm of the Saints does have a few more personal touches within its grooves that were never going to be explored with Graceland’s setup.
It also shows a lot more depth to Simon’s work, as he could change lanes and work with Brazilian musicians this time around. This was the perfect example of world music on par with anything that Peter Gabriel was doing at the time, and given how well it works in singles like ‘The Obvious Child’, it says a lot more about Simon’s ear for arrangements rather than his technical musical skill.
Because looking at where Simon was at that particular time, it wasn’t about knowing whether he could write songs anymore. He could clearly write perfect tunes from start to finish, so this was an opportunity to reverse his process and begin writing the songs with the right instrumentation in mind before he even started arranging everything.
