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Sun 13 September 2026 19:45, UK
There aren’t many people who have the same craftsmanship for songwriting that Paul Simon has.
Even though he wasn’t the most dynamic singer of all time and stuck mainly to acoustic guitar every single time he made a song, it was all about the way that he fed off of his backing musicians and if he could bring across the message of the tune correctly every time he found the right lyric. But when you look through some of his biggest songs, his songs catered to something much stronger than the typical pop-friendly lyrics.
And that’s by design most of the time. Simon and Garfunkel was a way for him and Art Garfunkel to hone their chops as harmony vocalists, and even though it took them a while to get the attention that they deserved, it wasn’t like Simon wanted to be tied to folk music forever. He had other plans for his music, and with new sounds, so too come new lyrical approaches whenever he sang as well.
Make no mistake, he was still a student of some of the greatest rock and roll writers that came before him, like Chuck Berry and The Everly Brothers, but there were certainly a lot of different avenues to try out when he began working with more experienced musicians. Steve Gadd could give him the perfect backdrop for a song like ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’, and once he collaborated with South African musicians, all the conventional rules for songwriting had gone out the window.
There was no set way for him to write a song at that point, and the best that he could hope for was making the kinds of tunes that could feed off the music first. That’s probably why so many of the songs on Graceland have a lot of different layers to them, the more that you peel back the sonic window dressing, but Simon hadn’t forgotten what made all good pop songs work, either.
He knew how to make some of the most complicated tunes in his catalogue sound simple half the time, and even though he knew his way around a hook, he never forgot the importance of a good love song. The Beatles had practically cornered the market on the practice when they became one of the biggest groups in the world, but the greatest songwriters of yesteryear were the ones who came from the stage productions long before the pop charts started to take over the world.
Simon was a fan of that style of song when he was woodshedding his own tunes in New York, and hearing someone like Stephen Sondheim make a tune like ‘Maria’ from West Side Story was everything that he ever needed, saying, “I was completely overwhelmed by the beauty of the song ‘Maria.’ It was a perfect love song. Sondheim was less enamoured with the lyric he wrote for Bernstein. He describes it as having a kind of ‘overall wetness’ — ‘a wetness, I regret to say, which persists throughout all the romantic lyrics in the show.’”
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But that ‘wetness’ that they’re implying all comes down to the details of the tune. Anyone could have written a generic love song that could fit in well with whatever was happening during the Broadway show, but the beauty of what makes Sondheim’s material work is because you feel like the characters in the song have flesh and blood, to the point where every word that they are singing make it sound like the world is going to end if things don’t resolve at the end of the song.
It takes a master’s touch to be able to have that level of drama on any of their songs, and Simon could only tip his hat in respect to what Sondheim taught him. Anyone can be a perfectionist and dwell on every single word that they write down, but the reason why Sondheim deserves to be respected is the bar that he set for people like Simon to expand their craft beyond the pop song structure.
