The one song Paul Simon said he should have never sang
Paul Simon isn’t exactly the first person that anyone would pick out of a lineup as a rock and roll star.
His music has helped people see the beauty of songwriting for years now, but there are also many points where he seems more in line with middle-aged dad music than anything remotely rock and roll. And while he does have a few songs that will live on forever in the musical canon, there are more than a few times when he tended to agree with the biggest critics in his career.
After all, the greatest showmen of all time practically had Simon beat before he even plucked a note on his acoustic guitar. He may have named an album Graceland, but even if the story of two people connecting over Elvis Presley wasn’t going to get nearly the same reaction as seeing Presley for the first time on television and lighting up every single heart in the room when he shook his ass.
But when you look at Simon’s discography, he’s not looking to be one of the showmen in the group. He left that to the other people onstage whenever he played, and even then, a lot of them were blowing people away with their raw musicianship rather than worrying about the kind of dance moves that they could make whenever they got up on that stage. That didn’t mean that Simon didn’t stop searching for new avenues to work in.
He had left Simon and Garfunkel wanting to go in a new direction, and it was anyone’s guess what his songs would sound like from one record to the next. All of them still had his knack for fantastic lyrics, but the backing band could be doing everything from South African music to complex jazz chords to the same folksy approach that Simon started with. Just don’t ask him to sing with as much gusto as his heroes.
Simon’s soft-spoken voice is absolutely perfect for a good 90% of his songs, but if you hear him going for the same kind of gospel runs as his heroes, he seems to be more embarrassed about it more than anything. He had spent his time as a folk songwriter, and trying to get that same kind of vocal timbre never really had the same effect that he wanted to when he cut the song for Still Crazy After All These Years.
The song is still fantastic, but Simon has said numerous times that he wasn’t the right person to perform the tune, saying, “When I first realized that I was free to go to any place that I wanted, I didn’t really think about how well I could play and there were times when I didn’t think I played very well. Like, ‘Gone at Last’, an up-tempo gospel song and I just don’t think I’m good at up-tempo gospel singing. I was better with gospel quartettes, something like ‘Loves Me Like a Rock.’”
And when you hear that, it makes a lot more sense why this song isn’t necessarily his proudest vocal. He delivers the song as best he can, but when he talks about getting a gospel quartette in the mix, you can’t help but think whether the song would have been a masterpiece had he brought in the big guns and let the backing vocals do a lot of the heavy lifting for him for most of the track.
Hindsight tends to be 20/20, but that doesn’t make ‘Gone at Last’ a failure by any stretch. If anything, it was a reminder that Simon could take a risk with a song that he didn’t know was going to work out or not, and even if the rest of his discography saw him finding the right musicians for every song, he could still find the right melody whenever he had the chance.
