(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 27 September 2025 17:00, UK
Sometimes it’s hard to write lyrics that you’re happy with, because there’s always the danger that they come off as trite. Someone like Paul Simon would surely hold himself to a high enough standard not to let this happen.
Yes, he may have filled songs like ‘The Boxer’ with some lazy “lie-di-die” filler lyrics, and he gave up early on in his quest to list off the ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’, presumably because he couldn’t figure out any more ways to rhyme names and methods that would top his “no need to be coy, Roy” and “just hop off the bus, Gus” offerings, but the rest of the time, his lyrics tend to hold up. You don’t get to be renowned as one of the greatest songwriters of all time if all of your lyrics are shit.
However, that doesn’t mean that he’s always been a fan of his own words, and when they don’t live up to the standards that he sets himself, he’s often decided to go through a painstaking process of trying to rewrite them to fit to a melody that he’s crafted. This is often something that writers tend not to enjoy doing, given how the lyrics often come first, and it’s easier to then write the rest of a song around them, but when you’re determined to make things work, this is the extent you have to go to.
Graceland is often regarded as the masterpiece of Simon’s solo career, and while its fusion of Western pop music with traditional music from South Africa is often the main talking point of the record, the lyrics are still up there with some of his best. However, when the album is this good, you need to set off on the right foot by opening the record with something solid, and not one that leaves the listener questioning exactly what they’ve chosen to dive into.
This is the problem that he encountered with ‘The Boy in the Bubble’, the first song on his 1986 record. While writing the song, he realised there was something gravely wrong with the lyrics, and that they weren’t fit enough for a place on the record. Speaking to American Songwriter in 2011, he revealed that this almost meant the song was scrapped entirely. “That’s a song that I wrote,” he said, “and didn’t like it at all and threw the whole thing out and said, “That’s awful,” and then rewrote it as ‘The Boy in the Bubble’.”
While it’s gone on to become one of the most beloved tracks from this record, we’re still not sure how the song would have sounded with Simon’s original words, and for that matter, he’s not entirely sure what they were anyway. “I can’t remember what it was and either I threw it all out or I threw 90 percent of it out, and kept a line or two,” he confirmed. “That’s happened a couple of times to me, not too often, but a couple of times. Very aggravating when it does happen.”
As irritating as this may sound for Simon to have had to deal with, at least his process of refinement is solid enough to ensure that songs like ‘The Boy in the Bubble’ aren’t canned before they have a chance to live, and Graceland would surely sound different without it as its opener.
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