(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Sat 14 February 2026 19:30, UK
There’s a certain musical hierarchy when it comes to the kind of songwriters that Paul Simon admires.
He was sure that people like Gershwin and Rodgers, and Hammerstein belonged in their own unique category, but in the world of singer-songwriters, he felt that he could at least hang with some of the biggest names in music if he wanted to. All that mattered was whether or not his songs had staying power, but Simon understood when someone had found their own unique voice whenever they started performing.
It sounds like the easiest thing in the world, but one of the hardest things to do in the industry is to be yourself. While every single parent has said those same words to their kids on their first day of school, even the biggest names in music suffer from sounding a little too much like their influences in their prime. That’s all well and good at the time, but what’s important is what you do with those influences.
David Bowie was always evolving when he started immersing himself in one type of music, and even in Simon’s case, he was able to reverse engineer his songwriting when he started writing with other instruments in mind. He wasn’t going to be able to play every single thing that ended up on Graceland, but he could at least translate his ideas in a way that made sense to every South African musician he worked with.
But the music wasn’t going to matter to him unless he had the right lyric behind him. There are plenty of songs where Simon felt he could have rewritten the lyrics, but even if he wrote some of the most nonsensical words of all time, a song like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ would still be heralded as one of the greatest songs ever written.
If he was going to leave an impact on someone, though, he needed to paint them a picture, and all of his influences were the kings of that. Bob Dylan put people right in the middle of the action on his protest tunes, and Joni Mitchell was practically making oil paintings that happened to be done with instruments instead of paint, but Bruce Springsteen got about as close to everyday life as anyone had ever done by that point.
Simon could definitely see some of those influences on Springsteen’s sleeve, but once ‘The Boss’ hit his stride, Simon was convinced he had carved out his own lane for himself, saying, “When I first heard Bruce, I thought, well, he’s like Dylan and Van Morrison. Somehow, he’s grown. Somehow, he’s made those South Jersey highways, the cars, into an archetypal, almost mythical American form of expression. He’s found a vocabulary to talk about what’s on his mind and in his heart.”
Then again, a lot of Springsteen’s voice doesn’t come from anything that he did. He may be the one who writes all the songs, but it took every member of the E Street Band to breathe life into those tunes. They would have been fantastic on their own if Springsteen wanted to be a solo artist, but the world would never be the same had he decided to release a song like ‘Jungleland’ without Clarence Clemons or not have Roy Bittan there to anchor every single piano line that turned up on his records.
Springsteen was still known as one of the greatest songwriters in the world for a reason, but his approach was a lot different from anything that Simon was ever thinking of. There are plenty of songwriters who can get the job done with one guitar, but it’s more about the energy that you create with the rest of the band that takes you from a decent musician to the greatest in your field.