The happiest song Paul Simon said he could ever write
Paul Simon wasn’t the kind of artist that could write on commission all that often.
There are places in the music industry carved out for people who could write like clockwork, but every one of Simon’s greatest hits needed proper care and attention before it was ready for primetime. But while he did help a lot of people think about songwriting much more than they usually would, that didn’t mean every song was a pick-me-up.
It’s not like Simon and Garfunkel were exactly a band that were down in the dumps, though. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ is a brilliant tune about being there for someone in their worst moments, and they do have a handful of satirical tunes in their catalogue like ‘A Simple Desultory Phillipic’, but their arrangement of ‘Scarborough Fair/Canticle’ is one of the most sobering moments to come out of the folk-rock movement.
Once Simon struck out on his own, though, it felt like he at least had more freedom to do what he wanted to. ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’ and ‘Mother and Child Reunion’ did have a much more upbeat mood to them, but they weren’t exactly what anyone would call happy. They felt like bite-sized novellas that were crammed into the length of a pop song, but Simon always had more fun when he was thinking outside of the realm of mainstream music.
And when he first started working on Graceland, he first had the opportunity to reverse his usual process. His songwriting chops were intact, but by having only the slightest sketch of what the tune was supposed to be, he would take the beginnings of a song like the title track and present them to the South African musicians he was working with to get a bold new take on whatever he was working with.
That way, ‘Graceland’ went from being a typical travelling beat song to one of the highlights of Simon’s career, and even he had to admit that it was among the brightest tunes he ever made, saying, “There are aspects of my personal life and my family’s personal life that are more grave than they were four years ago. And that’s in there. It was on my mind, it had to be in there. There’s something about having a very big hit that’s happy, like ‘Graceland’, that makes me think a little bit. I couldn’t get more happy. That would really be manic.”
And listening to Simon’s previous solo works, it’s easy to see where he gets that kind of nervous energy. Still Crazy After All These Years already feels like a breezy soft rock album from start to finish, but even the hits like ‘50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’ had a kind of lingering sense of tension behind them that he couldn’t really shake.
Not so with Graceland. Even when he’s making the more pointed lyrical statements on the record, there’s a sense of joy that comes out of listening to everyone in the group, especially on the live renditions of songs like ‘Under African Skies’ where the songs are allowed to come alive a little bit more.
Simon would always talk about overthinking his songs half the time, but Graceland is a classic example of him throwing caution to the wind and getting the best result possible. Not all of it is the most thoughtful music that he has ever made, but the biggest lesson that any songwriter needs to learn is that it’s sometimes okay for people to make records that are about having some fun.
