(Credits: Far Out / Record Sleeve)
Tue 11 November 2025 17:30, UK
No one can fault Paul Simon for wanting to be a perfectionist in his writing.
There’s not a soul that starts writing songs that doesn’t want to become a master of their craft, and given the amount of time that Simon worked on making sure his songs were exactly right, he deserves a spot below people like Bob Dylan among the greatest songwriters that pop ever spat out. But he could raise his hand and admit when a handful of his songs had a few fatal flaws behind the great melodies.
Then again, it’s easy to take a lot of the biggest songwriters of all time with a grain of salt. They’re always going to be a touch biased when it comes to their own records, and while it’s nice to have songs that they are proud of, there are more than a few times when someone like John Lennon would drag his own material through the mud and call the greatest Beatles songs nothing but trash.
But Simon’s approach to writing was a much different story. He wanted the respect of his peers as a musical visionary, but the lyrics were as important as everything else. ‘The Sound of Silence’ might not have been his personal favourite line he ever wrote, but when listening to the rest of his catalogue, it’s clear that he wanted to have music that reflected where he was at the time, rather than worrying about what kind of record was making the rounds on the charts.
So when he cut himself loose from Simon and Garfunkel, he should have been given free rein to do whatever the hell he wanted to do. His debut solo record already had some decent singles on it, like ‘Mother and Child Reunion’ and ‘Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard’, but he knew that he had the potential to do more. So if he couldn’t get the sound in his head with the rest of his band, it was time for him to venture into the realm of studio work and bring in the best technicians he could.
And of all his records, Still Crazy After All These Years feels a lot more indebted to that sound. Not everything on the record is a jazz-pop odyssey or anything, but there’s always subtle lilts in the music on tracks like ‘50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’ that are a lot more interesting than if he were playing the same folksy chords that he would have back in his early days singing ‘I Am A Rock’.
When it comes to the title track, however, Simon felt that the lyrics never sat that well with him, saying, “The song is a bit darker than people think. Because the chorus and the phrase are so suggestive of a long time passing, it has a touch of the ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to it. I don’t think people pay attention to the lyrics of the song, which makes me feel I probably wrote the wrong lyrics to it.”
Despite the song having a dark streak compared to everything else on the record, there’s a certain power between having a song that’s dark based around happy chords. It’s a pretty stark difference, but even if Simon didn’t intend it, you can feel the sense of paranoia that comes from someone thinking that they are slowly losing their way in life as the years go by.
It’s not exactly a pretty picture or anything, but not every rock and roll song is meant to have that kind of construction. Simon was never the kind of person to write happy-go-lucky songs whenever he sat down to write, but the greatest songs don’t come from someone whistling a catchy tune. It comes from the listener seeing a small piece of themselves in the artist, so if Simon thought that his lyrics were being ignored, it must have felt like people had shut the door on making any sort of connection.
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