The one word Paul Simon could never sing: “It’s just not a word”
When we talk about Paul Simon, it’s easy to label him as things like “conversational” or focus on one album in particular. But Simon’s appeal goes far beyond masterpieces like Graceland, just as his songwriting capability can never truly be condensed into one simple description or another.
This is something Simon himself has discussed time and time again. Besides giving a loose opinion on why his music is timeless (“if the song is beautiful, it lasts”), he also claims it to be this way because he rarely floats in the middle, usually using simplicity to his advantage. He also takes on the same approach as writers like Joni Mitchell, in that feeling something or ruminating on something needs to flow out of you and not become convoluted by butchered wordplay.
“I started to recognise that sometimes things happen, and all you have to do is just make sure it doesn’t get messed up as it passes through you,” Simon once said. And to be fair, that might be an obvious thing to say as a musician, or anyone who’s ever tried to write an emotionally evocative story, for that matter. But with Simon, it’s not about taking the same approach every time but letting the story itself lead the way, even if that attracts empty words like “conversational”.
But part of the charm of being this way, too. In being colloquial, but in a nuanced way that makes you feel a part of the story every time. And he often does this by factoring in subtle notes of humour or self-deprecation. The obvious example is ‘You Can Call Me Al’, but some of his better lines are the ones that are less overtly comedic and more witty, like ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’, which is as warm as it is because it’s so casually playful, but real and simple at the same time.
But while most of these seem like the most natural thing in the world, as if Simon’s easy quips come from a very organic place, that’s not always the case. When he was working on ‘Cool Papa Bell’, there was a bit of that humour under the surface, as he pointed towards in his linger notes later: “Legend has it the Bell could turn off a light switch, and be in bed before the light went out.” But there was also a part of the song that Simon struggled with, something you probably wouldn’t pick up on when listening to the song, and that’s saying the word “motherfucker”.
To his credit, it wasn’t that he couldn’t fit it into the humourless tone of the song – it fit perfectly, as we know just from listening to it. It was the fact that it wasn’t a word he used that made it so hard to gloss over at the time, so much in fact that he had to sing it multiple times to make it sound natural. And even though he got there in the end, it just felt completely out of character.
“Honestly, I must have sang ‘motherfucker’ 500 times to get it right,” he told Billboard. “It’s just not a word that’s in my normal way of talking. I hear it all the time and I had a point to make, but I didn’t know how to read the line. I had to just keep doing it and doing it until it finally sounded like, yeah, that was the unexpected reading of that line.”
