The 1986 album Paul Simon called too perfect to change: “The best of my ability”
Paul Simon always had incredibly high standards of what he wanted out of himself on every single record.
He liked the idea of shaking things up every single time he made a record, but he knew that he was never going to be satisfied if he felt like he was regressing in his songwriting too much. He needed records that reflected the sounds that he heard in his head, and if one thing was for sure, his material wasn’t going to sound anything like what he had done with Simon and Garfunkel over the past few years.
It’s not that any of his songs within the famous duo were bad, per se. They were fine just the way they were, but when you write a song that feels as gargantuan as ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, there’s no way that you’re going to top it, and Simon didn’t even try. In fact, a lot of the biggest hits of his career right out of the gate stood out because of how far away they were from the traditional folk-rock route.
The songs were still fantastic, but Simon’s biggest concern was the rhythm behind some of his new hits. He didn’t want to spend his time strumming away as he did in the 1960s, and when you look at the company he kept, he knew what he was after. The rhythm section of Steve Gadd and Tony Levin on Still Crazy After All These Years lived for switching things up, and Simon felt that he could hang with musicians from the jazz world and pull it off effectively as long as he had the right foundation.
But while jazz was all well and good, there’s no way Simon was going to limit himself to the Western world. He knew there was a lot more music out there, and even though he would get heavily criticised for going to South Africa during apartheid, Graceland was the kind of happy medium that any artist can only hope to make. Because when you listen to the album, you’re hearing musicians finding their common language on every track.
Simon is still the one writing all the tunes, but hearing all of his backing band play off each other is the real treat. The title track is the typical country-and-western style travelling beat if it were fed through the South African mould, and ‘Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes’ has some of the most infectious riffs on the entire album, especially when the bass glides up during the chorus of the song alongside Simon’s voice.
The whole album sounds like a mini symphony in many respects, but Simon thought that finding his way with musicians like this would have been impossible, saying, “For a long while after I recorded the tracks, I thought ‘I can’t write anything here because the tracks are too perfect. Anything I put on it is only going to take away from how great the music is’. But eventually, I found ways of writing songs. I wanted to be, to the best of my ability, worthy of the music that I was singing over.”
And since Simon was already used to making fantastic songs, Graceland is the perfect example of him reverse-engineering his original process. Most songwriters usually find the basis of the song and then build the track around what they already have, but Simon was one of the only artists in a position where he could find a way to write the song around the backing tracks that he already had and figure the details out later.
The musicians may have already sounded too perfect, but being able to do justice to them should never have been a concern for Simon. After all, the biggest part of any band is being able to talk to musicians without using many words, and Simon’s lyrics gave these tunes the breath that they needed.
