Was Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ inspired by Carrie Fisher?
After missing out on a promising role in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver to Jodie Foster in the mid-1970s, Carrie Fisher prospered in George Lucas’ sci-fi franchise, Star Wars. The monumental movie series was introduced in 1977 with the first instalment, A New Hope, which launched Fisher irrevocably to global fame alongside co-stars Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford.
When she began work on the first Star Wars movie, Fisher was just 19 years old. Through her early 20s, she experienced the perks and pitfalls of fame with a transient fling with Harrison Ford and high-profile parties with the entertaining elite, including a drug-fuelled party with The Rolling Stones. Such experiences set Fisher up for a life in the fast lane, with a gregarious, fun-loving attitude acquainting her with everyone she met.
In 1978, Fisher met singer-songwriter Paul Simon through their mutual friend, Shelley Duvall. “Years ago, there were tribes that roamed the earth, and every tribe had a magic person,” Fisher wrote in her 2008 memoir, Wishful Drinking. “Well, now, as you know, all the tribes have dispersed, but every so often, you meet a magic person, and every so often, you meet someone from your tribe. Which is how I felt when I met Paul Simon.”
The pair fell in love at first sight, entering into a 12-year off-and-on relationship fraught with upheaval. This intriguing instance of pop-cultural alchemy had a monumental impact on the life and work of each. “Once they saw each other, no one else mattered to either of them,” Peter Ames Carlin wrote in Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon. “Carrie added velocity to [Paul’s] life, a kind of wild energy that often set him alight and sometimes made him scream.”
Simon and Fisher encountered several unfortunate bumps on their road. Often, the dissonance was centred around the pair’s 14-year age gap and the associated disparity in maturity. While Simon sought to control and balance, Fisher enjoyed a high-intensity social life. Although the pair married in 1983, they divorced in 1984 but acted on and off again through the mid-80s, both reluctant to abandon their special connection.
At the end of the 1980s, the couple would break up for the final time as both moved on to new relationships. Naturally, both were left heartbroken by the way things turned out, but the relationship had contributed to artistic output, if nothing else. For Fisher, the relationship inspired her writing and screenwriting exploits, while Simon found the fractious association to be a fertile source of musical inspiration.
Most famously, Simon summarised the relationship in his 1983 song ‘Hearts and Bones’, which he once described as “a better song” than ‘The Sound of Silence’. “Two people were married / The act was outrageous / The bride was contagious,” he sings. In an interview with Paul Zollo, Simon later reflected, “That was one of my best songs. It took a long time to write it, and it was very true. It was about things that happened. The characters are very near to autobiographical. It’s probably the only track that I really like on that album.”
Simon also wrote his songs ‘Allergies’ and ‘She Moves On’ about his relationship with Fisher, the latter arriving as a final farewell in 1990. Four years before, Simon released Graceland, the well-received, upbeat follow-up to Hearts and Bones. Although Simon has never confirmed it, Fisher claimed that the famous title track was partly inspired by her.
In ‘Graceland’, Simon sings of an escape to the titular mansion formerly owned by Elvis Presley in Memphis, Tennessee. As the song rolls on, it’s apparent that he has an energetic female companion in mind: “There is a girl in New York City / Who calls herself the human trampoline / And sometimes when I’m falling, flying / Or tumbling in turmoil I say / ‘Whoa, so this is what she means’ / She means we’re bouncing into Graceland”.
In a past interview, Simon revealed that the song was inspired by an impulsive trip he took to visit Presley’s grave in Graceland. “That [trip] was where the ‘Mississippi delta was shining like a nation guitar’ came from,” Simon explained. “It was literally in front of me. And then I went to Graceland. I didn’t tell anybody I was coming. I didn’t get any special treatment. I just waited in line… I was singularly unimpressed.”
“I came outside, and there’s his grave, and it said ‘Elvis Presley whose music touched millions of people all around the world’, and I read that and I just started to cry, I mean this guy was loved by everybody,” he continued.” The song started to write itself. It became a narrative. It became about this father and son journey to mend a broken heart, and Graceland became more like a metaphor than an actual destination.”
In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, Fisher revealed that, despite the past, she still enjoyed listening to Simon’s music. She added that she even liked “the songs he wrote about our relationship. Even when he’s insulting me, I like it very much. If you’re gonna be insulted, that’s the way to go. ‘Graceland’ has part of us in it.”
Listen to Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ below.
