(Credits: Far Out / Columbia Records)
Sun 9 November 2025 18:05, UK
Turns out Paul Simon is just generally good. He’s an all-rounder balancing many skills. Sure, he can write a good song, and he can compose a good track, but his abilities go far beyond that. In fact, Simon is perhaps almost too good.
It’s hard to understate the influence of Paul Simon. In his role as Simon and Garfunkel, he wrote era-defining songs and even soundtracked era-defining movies like The Graduate. They were a mainstay on the thriving folk scene here, helping it become the powerful genre it was, and still is, by penning new classics and standards.
Then, in his solo work too, Simon’s influence loomed large. A track like ‘50 Ways To Leave Your Love’ is written into the world’s songbook as one of those tunes everyone knows, while a song like ‘Graceland’ and the album it gives title to proves that Simon’s experimentation wasn’t stalled at all by that new chapter, it only got more interesting.
In the modern day, his influence is palpable. Countless modern stars lay thanks at his feet as Harry Styles regularly cites Simon as an influence, saying in 2019, “I wish I had written ’50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,’” calling it, “the greatest verse melody ever written”. Lorde also looks up to the star, seeing him as a pinnacle to reach, as she told The Guardian, “I want to be really, really good one day. I think I’m pretty good now. I think I’ve made a good start. But I want to be Paul Simon.”
However, as he’s well established in his music, Simon is more than just good, or even really, really good. Even in the wider world outside of being an artist, he proved that, as it once literally put him out of a job when he tried to first enter the regular working world.
While pursuing his own music early on, Simon got a job in the industry in any way he could, as he began working for a music publisher, E B Marks. As a true legacy company that had been running a long time before Simon ever graced its door, the publishers had an extensive back catalogue and a long-established way of doing things.
Really, though, Simon was a lousy publisher and a worse salesman, so perhaps we’ve found one flaw. “I couldn’t sell one song,” he told Rolling Stone, “It was rock & roll’s time. I felt bad, I couldn’t get anything sold, and so I’d write a song and let them publish it.”
However, what Simon could do was write up a mean report. Turns out the man has a knack for professional documents. As reported by Rolling Stone, the story goes: “One day, the man who owned E.B. Marks called him in and asked, ‘Who wrote this report?’ Simon answered that he had. The man said, ‘No, you didn’t.’ Simon said, ‘Yes, I did.’ The man insisted, ‘No, you didn’t. It’s written too well.’”
The back and forth pissed Simon off as it felt like the company was questioning his intelligence. This was a man with an English degree from Queens College, didn’t they know?
“Fuck you, I quit.” That was Simon’s response. No one was going to tell him he was too good at doing the job he realistically didn’t even want to be doing. So he walked as perhaps the only man to be forced out of a company by being too skilled.
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