(Credits: Harry Chase, Los Angeles Times)
Mon 1 December 2025 18:30, UK
Nothing that Paul Simon ever made ever came from thinking about his place in the world.
All great songs are the ones that end up becoming evergreen, thanks to the human emotion that people put into them, rather than the trends they were keeping up with or the strange risks they took. While Simon certainly did manage to defy people’s expectations every so often when he played, he did feel like being remembered as one of the greatest composers of the past century was beside the point.
That’s not to say that he isn’t proud of his work, though. ‘The Sound of Silence’ is one of the songs that he claimed would be remembered over a century later, but that still comes from the fact that anyone could feel those same feelings he was talking about. No one was a stranger to that sense of unease, but Simon also didn’t feel like he needed to live vicariously through that song for the rest of his life.
Because for all great artists, their goal is to make songs that speak to the time they were living rather than reaching the charts. None of the songwriters before the days of pop charts were all that concerned with recapturing the same magic every time they wrote a song, and whether someone was singing the blues or listening to the smoothest jazz anyone had ever laid down, it was understood that each performance was bound to sound completely different.
Even a lot of Simon’s heroes were doing the same thing. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan definitely had their fair share of albums that were being done to capitalise on a certain market, but if you were to look through their records in chronological order, they do a better picture at telling one long, epic journey than focusing on a specific place and time when they were writing their classics.
And no one managed to paint a more colourful picture of their career than Prince. From day one, he was always looking to take music in any direction that he wanted to, and while his work in the 1980s will forever be immortalised, the amount of material that he was able to crank out throughout his career made each new endeavour feel like one additional notch on his belt than one musical peak.
But upon hearing of his passing, Simon said that ‘The Purple One’ would probably be forgotten the minute after people stopped reporting on his death, saying, “I’m not that interested in my legacy. I didn’t do this so everyone would applaud for me when I’m dead. I did it because I was really interested in solving a musical problem, because I selfishly was getting a lot of pleasure out of doing this. I’m glad of the fact other people like it, and say thank you. I didn’t do it for you, but I’m glad you like it. So when I think about Prince’s legacy, I think the truth is next week it won’t be a story. And I doubt that he would even care.”
Then again, that’s not a case of Simon wanting to put down what Prince did. There’s no doubt that he created spellbinding music that no one else could have thought of, but even if no one had heard a single note that he played, the important thing for Simon was that his fellow rock and roll legend was able to make the kind of records that satisfied him over everybody else in his field.
There is no shortage of Prince fans who will pore over every single record he made to get the full story of his life, but as far as Simon was concerned, it was never about how well an artist’s music is preserved. It’s about whether they have made the statement that they wanted to in the time that they have, and if they fulfilled that, who cares what anyone else thought?
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