How does Paul Simon write his classic songs?
In 2018, Paul Simon released In The Blue Light, a record in which he re-recorded some of his lesser-known classics. This way, he would either achieve things in the studio that he couldn’t at the time or simply change aspects of the original recordings he never much liked. This is a tried-and-true tactic of many bands and artists in their twilight years.
Van Morrison did the same thing a couple of years back, and the most recent U2 release was a 40-song acoustic record covering their own songs. With Simon, though, a cash-in is the very last thing you could call this record. After all, Simon is the kind of artist who constantly looks for and—constantly finds—new sources of inspiration. He could, after all, have stayed in the niche he cut out for himself with Art Garfunkel and stayed a be-jumpered folkie.
The records sold more than enough, and he had the critical acclaim to boot. That was never going to be enough for him, though. Instead, Simon spent the entirety of the 1970s pushing himself in a series of solo records that combined witty, literate lyricism with any kind of music he could find.
Then, in the 1980s, he pushed the boat out even further to find his solo commercial peak. The 1986 masterpiece Graceland combines his self-effacing story-telling with jubilant South African street music. All this to say that just because he’s entering the twilight years of his career doesn’t mean that he’s content to rest on his laurels. Half-arsing any record isn’t in his (extensive) vocabulary, even if it is, at its heart, a covers album.
If you need proof, look at the way Simon talks about arguably the centrepiece of the whole record, a reworked version of ‘Darling Lorraine’, a lesser spotted gem from his 2000 studio album ‘You’re The One’. In an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he went deep on how much giving this phenomenal song the spotlight it deserved meant to him. He begins with an absolutely fascinating look into not just his songwriting process but the way he builds the characters in his songs.
This insight into Paul Simon’s creative process perfectly captures the magic of his songwriting. He explains that the lyrics often come to him before he fully understands where the song is headed. While working on a particular song about a meeting between a man and a woman, the man introduces himself as “Frank, from New York, New York”. Simon told Stephen Colbert that no real New Yorker would be that specific, which led him to realise that this Frank wouldn’t “be all that honest.”
Thus, Simon finds the concept for the entire song and builds it from there. He begins the story with a cliché (“I like a cliché, in the beginning”), that of the fool in love, and then twists it. The narrator says “All my life I’ve been a wanderer / Not really, I mostly lived near my parents’ home”. The song then comes to life as this study of a serial liar who found someone who fell for his ways, then she had enough of it, telling him, “I’m sick of being your darling Lorraine.”
‘Darling Lorraine’ has the depth and craft to be a classic short story. Any lyricist in the world would want credit for a song like this and by reworking it for In The Blue Light, that’s exactly what happened. Would that all these glorified covers albums unearth hidden gems the way that Paul Simon did here.
