“It’s all perfect”: the Paul Simon song he called a masterpiece
Any songwriter who’s been around as long as Paul Simon will have those few songs that shine better than others. It’s never easy to choose between musical children, but there are often those few moments where everything comes together almost by magic without ever having to think about it too much. Although Simon did have those moments of sheer brilliance in Simon and Garfunkel, he felt that this solo song was one of the only times where he couldn’t have done anything better.
Then again, Simon wasn’t looking to do anything traditional when working on his solo career. He had spent years making the same folk-rock in Simon and Garfunkel, and while it was interesting to see him going through different genres on Bridge Over Troubled Water, that push and pull between him and Art Garfunkel was far too great for either of them to put up with each other in the studio anymore.
However, whereas Simon’s self-titled debut saw him score great hits right out of the gate, some of his best work came from him thinking outside the lines. Even when making a massive hit like ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’, his affinity for jazz chords made him stand apart from the same old folk-rockers who played the same cowboy chords they had learned as kids and prayed that they could make a tune out of them.
By the 1980s, though, Simon felt that he needed to reverse his process to keep things fresh, which meant exploring things outside the country. While he may have been critiqued for travelling to South Africa during apartheid, Graceland is the result of his taking the concept of world music and bringing it into Western culture.
While the record itself is far from the first world music album ever made, the title track is the best way that two disparate genres managed to blend. Even though pieces of the song sound like that travelling beat that people had grown accustomed to from old westerns, hearing the South African musicians interpret that rhythm is what makes the song move, especially with the strange turnarounds throughout the verses.
While every song on the album has that same spirit to it, Simon still felt that the song ‘Graceland’ was one of the peaks of his career as a songwriter, saying, “Graceland is my favourite record. My favourite song that I’ve ever wrote. This is it; this is the best I ever did. It’s all perfect. It begins so relaxed. There’s no lyrics. It’s taking its time.”
Even if the groove appealed to Simon, it’s saying a lot that ‘Graceland’ isn’t even the most musically sophisticated on the record. Listening to a song like ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’, the way that the bass plays off the vocal during the verses is one of the greatest moments that the 1980s ever spat out.
For a genre that had been long past its prime by the mid-1980s, ‘Graceland’ was Simon proving to everyone that he still had something to say after years of being known as pillowy soft rock. The album itself still has the stench of dad rock for some people, but sometimes those dads are much more sophisticated than they are given credit for.
