(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Sat 13 December 2025 17:30, UK
One of the main factors that ensured Paul Simon’s success was that he knew how to build art around a good story.
It’s also one of the reasons why people tend to appreciate Simon more than his musical partner in crime, Art Garfunkel. Both had immense success in their solo careers, but it doesn’t take an expert to notice how Simon went that little bit further, not only in the quality of his artistic vision but in his longstanding cultural impact through his melodies and songwriting genius.
That said, Simon’s trajectory as a solo artist wasn’t always plain sailing. In fact, his split from Garfunkel is one of the most documented feuds in music history and, over the years, details of their so-called disdain for one another, particularly at the end of their journey as collaborators, seem to have become especially mythologised.
However, this is mainly because they claim to have pushed themselves to their limits long after they should have and tried to keep going with something that they each knew had long been over. For instance, Simon once said that their partnership was already over “before the ‘70s began”, which, when you consider their attempts to keep it going through Hearts and Bones, seems especially telling.
Simon eventually erased all of Garfunkel’s work on the record and put it out as one of his own, but that’s not all that surprising when you look at the bigger picture, and not just in relation to their frayed dynamics at that point. In fact, the record was one of Simon’s most personal yet, with songs addressing many aspects of his own life in close and intimate ways, like his relationship with Carrie Fisher.
Many of Simon’s best songs play out this way, maybe not as on the nose as others, but in the subtle ways that he navigates his own thoughts and feelings. One common thread is ageing and finding his position in life, which is one of the things that initially inspired ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’. Although the title suggests some kind of stagnancy in finding a purpose, there’s a dissonance there, too, that doesn’t match up to the atmosphere of the song.
“The song is a bit darker than people think,” Simon once admitted to Q magazine. “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 lyric to it.”
As is the case with most of his best songs, Simon has a connection with ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’ that runs deeper than most people will ever know or understand. Coming from an intensely personal place, the song allows ambiguities where it counts, with the listener often deriving their own meaning from it based on wherever they’re at in their own lives – a staple of Simon’s songs, especially the ones about the complexities of time.
This might’ve also been why he wanted Karen Carpenter to take it on, knowing that her full, soulful voice would give it a perspective he couldn’t achieve. Carpenter’s version was eventually included on her posthumous self-titled album from 1996, a moment of poignancy after the record had been lost and shelved for so many years before its final release.
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