Ranking Paul Simon’s seven favourite Paul Simon songs
It’s with a wry wink and a smile that Paul Simon sings, “I don’t know why I spend my time / writing songs I can’t believe / with words that tear and strain to rhyme”. He’s written hundreds of songs over the years, and I’m not sure if any of them have fallen foul of the accusations he accosts himself with in ‘Kathy’.
In stark contrast, as a songwriter, the only ironic criticism that naysayers could justly yield against him is perfection. Words fold into melodies so gracefully in his songs that you can’t wrestle one from the other as you read them on paper. And the words in question always feel lived-in and earnest, brilliantly capturing the witty New York vernacular with his own unique brand of listlessness.
His back catalogue is also something that he has always remained acutely aware of himself. “The language starts to get more interesting in Hearts and Bones. The imagery started to get a little interesting,” Simon said of his own work, highlighting his 1983 album as a turning point perceptible to nobody but himself.
In a similar act of self-discerning, when he recently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he picked out his seven best songs. ‘America’, ‘Kathy’, ‘Hearts and Bones’ and ‘The Obvious Child’ are all notable absentees for my money, but it‘s evident from his own picks that he’s a man who knows what it is that makes something a hit.
The seven tracks that Simon champions are all largely classics, but which of them stand out as his defining masterpieces? Well, ranking them is certainly no easy task, especially given his evolving style where each chapter has its own merits, but we’ll give it a whirl…
Ranking Paul Simon’s seven favourite songs:
‘Late In The Evening’
Of all the classic songwriters of the counterculture age, you could certainly argue that Simon transitioned the smoothest into the glitzy realm of the 1980s. You only have to look at the album cover for Empire Burlesque to know that Bob Dylan was somewhat lost amid the rise of synths, but Simon’s songwriting held strong with the diminutive star skillfully coupling his folk sensibilities with a new age of pop technology.
‘Late in the Evening’ is a maximalist composition that somehow still leaves room for plenty of nostalgia and personal corroborations on the part of the listener. As he sings of early memories of his mother listening to music, your own childhood tends to enter the fray in a stirring showcase of Simon’s ability to somehow make the deeply personal feel easily universal.
‘Still Crazy After All These Years’
Once again, Simon’s knack for codifying imagery untold comes to the fore with ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’. He makes no mention of red neon light or the bar being on the corner of the street, reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s classic painting, Nighthawks, but for some reason, that’s how I picture it. You might picture it differently, but one thing is for sure, it’s such a deeply visual song that you‘re certainly picturing something.
It’s also an incredibly simple song beyond that mystic imagery, consisting of two verses, a bridge and a recurring refrain more so than a distinct chorus, but it achieves a hell of a lot with those rather rudimentary parts. While the notion of old lovers encountering a chance rekindling might not be the most original subject matter (and perhaps songs like ‘Martha’ by Tom Waits have done it better), Simon captures the essence of longing’s clinging claws with defining clarity.
‘Mother and Child Reunion’
It’s rare that a Chinese menu inspires such magic, but it’s also a telling sign of Simon’s uncanny ability to extract poetry from the everyday that perusing culinary options could stir thoughts of familial bonds in times of great conflict. A chicken and egg dish in a Chinatown restaurant inspired the folk songwriter to travel to Jamaica to record a reggae flipside to Jimmy Cliff’s mournful ‘Vietnam’ about a soldier who dies in battle.
A lesser songwriter may well have made this experiment seem like trite appropriation, but Simon’s sincerity and deft way of bringing hope to a serious subject without diminishing it comes across expertly. Beyond the beauteous melody, clever lyrics, and catchiness, after breaking up with Art Garfunkel, the compositional side of the song also exhibited Simon’s brilliant ability as a bandleader – the performances across the board give the song an exultant sense of joy.
‘Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard’
Some songs just nail an emotion, capturing a feeling that we’ve all felt with a melody that we’ve never heard. That’s the triumph of ‘Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard’. There’s no way my niece can comprehend the secret mystery of “what the mama saw” at her tender age of six, but that seemingly doesn’t stop her from grooving to the ingratiating tune like it‘s as familiar, knowable, and fun as an old friend.
But this isn’t just a ‘pleasing’ piece of music from rhyming Simon, if it was then there’s no way strange chimp-like noises and an odd undercurrent of crime would feature. However, Simon daringly takes the sweet strumming and subverts it with invention and mystery. The end result is one that typifies his approach: always uncompromising, never cynical. Depth and commercial appeal sit side by side, conjuring the eternally relatable image of a schoolyard.
‘The Sound of Silence‘
There are very few songs that you couldn’t imagine the world without, but ‘The Sound of Silence’ is one of them. Somehow, at the tender age of 21, Simon utterly crystallised the poeticism of wintery despair. For 100 years to come, anytime anyone turns up their coat collar, this dainty masterpiece will spring to their mind, and that’s a potent symbol of art reaching a transcendent pinnacle where it stops being a song and enters the social fabric of our lives.
It might have since been memeified, but that’s only really a measure of how knowable it is. Once again, Simon’s clarity comes across. From the sombre music to the simple utterance of “Hello darkness my old friend,” you can understand the song and exactly what it is conveying. Alas, its triumph is also its Achilles’ heel, with tracks like ‘America’ just containing more multitudes to contend with.
‘The Boxer’
It’s a glowing anthem that got the seal of approval from Bob Dylan, and Art Garfunkel saw it as the moment everything came together for the duo. “I have a particular feel that I could do really well, and match Paul and make the whole thing ripple and articulate it just right,” the singer opined in relation to the track. That feeling of coalescence is writ large across the masterful song which, once again, swells with deep transcendence.
The entrapment of a dream, the imprisonment of an escape that you can’t return from, or whatever else it may be that keeps the mythic fighter standing serves as one of the greatest metaphors in music. That alone would be powerful enough, but Simon pairs this beat poetry of people in the gutter with soaring orchestration that seeks out starry skies. The result is a soft and gentle right hook that could even acquaint Mike Tyson with the canvas. Even after a thousand listens, if the song catches you just right, it retains the capacity to floor you.
‘Graceland’
‘Graceland’ is the perfect measure of Simon’s ability to do so much with so little. The song is less than five minutes long, but in that time he captures the rise of American rock ‘n’ roll, the story of a father and son road trip, snippets of Kerouacian prose, a hitherto unknown blend of isicathamiya style music and the blues, a homage to Elvis Presley, one of the greatest break-up lyrics ever written, and a stunning display of syncopationn being used to reset a melody. Somehow, all of this is woven together like petrol into a puddle creating a galactic swirl of a song.
Simon was 45 when he wrote the track, and Joe Strummer would later highlight it as a new dawn in popular music, whereby popular songs could tackle subject matters beyond typical youth culture trends. This mature advancement to pop music remains a pivotal moment to this day. In a manner that didn’t feel old or dated, Simon brought a vitality and freshness to a song that actively avoids all platitudes and plays out like the story of a lifetime in a matter of mesmeric minutes.
