(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Thu 19 February 2026 18:30, UK
Every time you hear a Paul Simon song, you’re not only getting a nice melody.
A lot of his greatest tunes usually carry a little piece of him in between the grooves, and even if the song itself isn’t always autobiographical, there are certain lines that couldn’t have come from anyone else when he sits down to write a tune. But even if you can tell that it’s him within the first few lines of a song, it’s a lot easier for him to realise that some songs shouldn’t really be coming out of his mouth.
Granted, there are some pieces that were forever going to be off-limits. No one was expecting the same kid who wrote songs like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ or ‘The Sound of Silence’ to suddenly pull out the Mick Jagger dance moves or entertain an audience like James Brown did, but he did always have his own bag of tricks to pull out whenever he had the right musicians working off of him.
If you think about it, an album like Still Crazy After All These Years is already fine with Simon’s performance, but getting the studio legends in there to work with him, like Steve Gadd and Tony Levin, was the perfect foil for what he was singing about. But for Simon, getting the greatest song meant a lot more than having a nice melody. Because if you didn’t have the right lyric in front, it wasn’t going to mean anything.
While people like Kurt Cobain made an entire career off of lyrics that didn’t always make the most sense, Simon wasn’t that kind of songwriter. He wanted to be a lot more literate than what rock and roll was usually given credit for, and when diving into the lyrics that he put on every one of his albums, it’s easy to feel him getting more in tune with the kind of stories that he wanted to tell.
But not all songwriters are cut from the same cloth. The whole reason why those songs work is because they’re coming from a genuine place, and there were more than a few artists who didn’t seem to approach it in the same way that Simon did. Bob Dylan was certainly out of his reach, but he was also willing to admit that straight-ahead rock and roll songs weren’t necessarily in his wheelhouse, either.
He had a love of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, but being able to make songs the same way that Bruce Springsteen and Elton John could were never going to happen, saying, “I think that those songwriters who grew up in rock and roll and were prominent in the 1960s have to keep writing about their lives as they reach their thirties. There’s no need for me to write ‘Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting.’ It’s not in my life anymore. Somebody’s gonna write that and write it well, though, and somebody’s gonna write ‘Born to Run’ and write it very well.”
That wasn’t how Simon wrote songs, but both John and ‘The Boss’ were much different animals anyway. Bernie Taupin’s lyrics set up pictures in the listener’s mind every single time he wrote a tune with John, and while Springsteen did get the Dylan tag more than a few times throughout his career, he was more than happy to talk about the kind of America that he saw every day rather than be too wordy for the hell of it.
So while Simon wasn’t going to make those kinds of leaps, it wasn’t exactly a hindrance to his solo career. He had his own set of tools, and there were more than a few times when he could end up making albums like Graceland that no one else could have even imagined taking on at the time.