The song Paul Simon said screwed up an entire album
There are very few people who have an ear for songwriting quite like Paul Simon. Ever since he was young, he has been able to dance around with various rhythms and melodies in a bid to create some of the most beautiful tracks ever committed to sound. Whatever point in his career you’re looking at, you will find a trail of excellent songs along the way. Whether this was as a solo artist or with Simon and Garfunkel, the quality never dips.
Of course, being a master of your craft can often be a double-edged sword. How many times do we see geniuses drive themselves into a hole because of how much they obsess over making something perfect? Many different artists have struggled to get themselves back on track once they have written something that both they (and those around them) consider faultless.
Look at the Eagles, while many of us consider Hotel California to be the best piece of music they’ve ever made, it set the band off on a tangent as they struggled to work out how they could ever live up to the subsequent hype. The result was a lukewarm album that listeners (and the band themselves) weren’t too happy with. The Long Run is a solid record, but compared to what people knew the Eagles could achieve, it didn’t come close to meeting expectations.
In Simon’s case, it wasn’t an album that messed up his creative process, but a singular song. He was never afraid to write from different perspectives, which meant some songs came from a place of fiction, and some stemmed from real life. One thing you could always guarantee was that if Simon wanted to create something with a narrative, he would throw himself into that narrative in order to give the listener something they could submerge themselves in and be moved by.
One of the songs he did this on best was the 1983 release ‘Hearts and Bones’. The track featured on an album of the same name, and while Simon was incredibly proud of the song, he wasn’t sure how to build an album around it. There was a narrative attached to the track as it was about his relationship with the actress Carrie Fisher, whom he married just a few months before the song was released.
The issue was that the song was a singular event, and it had a narrative attached, but was part of an album where other narratives were missing. It threw the whole album off course because he was working out how to write songs that fit around the album and made it feel like a natural listening experience. The best idea didn’t come to him until after the record was released, as he realised he should have just made ‘Heart and Bones’ the first song so that it’s established early on as an introduction, and then the listener can simply enjoy the rest of the record. This idea came too little, too late, however.
“Thats one of my best songs. It took a long time to write it and its very true. It was about things that happened. And I like it, I like the record. I should have put it as the first track. I should never have put ‘Allergies’ as the first track,” said Simon, “I was beginning to understand about writing on that album. How to do it, when to use ordinary language and when to use enriched language. Of course, that’s a story song and my story songs tend to be a more natural form for me.”
