The classic lyric Paul Simon is constantly changing
Paul Simon’s discography is so huge, it’s a miracle that even he can keep up with it.
At his latest concert, he’s still playing ‘Homeward Bound’, a song released in 1966 and written years before that. Decades upon decades are a long time to hold onto the right words, so sometimes, he simply has to switch them up.
At a certain point, it becomes muscle memory. Most Simon & Garfunkel fans can probably sing ‘Homeward Bound’, or get through a song like ‘Sound of Silence’ or ‘America’ without really having to think about the lyrics. They simply soak into us, embed into our being as words and melodies we know to our core and no longer have to consciously consider.
To a degree, it must be the same for Simon himself, except for the fact that he actually has to sound good and play guitar at the same time. It’s somewhat the same, besides the fact that he has to do that however many times over, memorising five albums with the band, and 15 solo records. Sometimes, the words simply slip away, and sometimes they slip away almost immediately, being lost from the second they’ve even been recorded.
That’s the story of ‘Kodachrome’, a 1973 single from his third album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Not considered his best release, it’s a record that exists sandwiched in the shadows between his 1972 self-titled record and 1975’s masterpiece, Still Crazy After All These Years. As a lead single, it did well, hitting the chart and being a catchy little pop ditty, yet, despite the catchiness, one lyric has spent a lifetime slipping away from Simon, to the point where he’s given up on the idea of memorising it, surrendering instead to constantly changing it up.
On the recording, on the original album version, Simon sings, “everything looks worse in black and white”, seemingly a statement about embracing colour, uncertainty and, ultimately, life as a broad, messy and beautiful thing.
Yet in some live recordings, you hear him sing “everything looks better in black and white”, with this particular lyric seemingly calling for a return to an old-time, to nostalgia in an old Hollywood, old film photography type of way. It feels more rigid and pessimistic, though, seemingly changing the tone of the piece in only one word.
It’s not a purposeful switch-up; it is simply that Simon forgot what came first. “I can’t remember which way I originally wrote it, ‘better’ or ‘worse’,” he said, as the album says “better” but something in him always seems to return to “worse”, leaving him to wonder what was first written in the misplaced notepad containing the initial idea.
The only solution is to embrace it, as Simon has concluded, “I always change it”. But that’s clearly just the nature of this song, along with plenty of other tracks from his solo career or the bands career than have undergone switch ups or full reworkings, like the infamous unofficial re-do of ‘Sound of Silence’ by a radio DJ that led to the song’s major success, forcing the band to welcome the evolving nature of music if they wanted to thrive.
