Credit: YouTube Still
Sat 10 October 2026 20:30, UK
Paul Simon didn’t want to spend his time making the same old songs whenever he made a record.
Some of the greatest tunes of his career usually came from him trying to go against the grain and see what he could accomplish on his own, and while he tried his best to still keep everything in line with folk, it was only a matter of time before he started to work with people outside of his comfort zone. He knew that he wasn’t going to be happy playing with Art Garfunkel for the rest of his life, and the most that he could hope for was to find other musicians who seemed to understand what he wanted to get out of his songs.
Which is probably why his solo career ended up sounding so different from what everyone was used to. Not everyone would have seen the different sounds of world music coming when Simon first started working on tunes like ‘The Sound of Silence’, but a lot of what he was doing wasn’t about making the most eccentric music in the world. All that mattered was the song, and when he had the right idea, he knew that he could then find the right arrangement to put around it at any given time.
But when you listen to the first few records that he made during his solo career, he wasn’t going to throw his audience into something that they weren’t ready for. Anyone would have tried their best to make music that still had the right pulse to it, but after years of working in the folk tradition, Simon was ready to incorporate little bits of jazz into his sound or add in the one strange chord that changed the mood of any of his songs.
If you were to have only listened to Simon’s work in the 1960s, though, not many people would have seen a song like Graceland coming. The influence of South African music had seeped into everything that he had worked on around that time, and while Simon had tried his best to incorporate his traditional folksy sound into everything he did, there was no way that he was going to be able to tell his backing band what to play.
These were some of the greatest South African musicians in the world, and what they were doing took his music into another realm. ‘The Boy in the Bubble’ would have been a much tamer affair if Simon had stuck with a traditional Americanised arrangement, but even when woodshedding the first pieces of his material, he remembered being a little bit inferior when he first heard what a band like Ladysmith Black Mambazo was playing when they came to the forefront.
The singers were incredible, but Simon couldn’t help but feel a little bit tame by comparison, saying, “I was bewitched by Ladysmith Black Mambazo because they were so beautiful. The music was enchanting – it was all a cappella, and it was so beautiful that I was intimidated. They were so good at what they did and it was so contained that I didn’t know at the time how I could possibly fit into their world.” When they all got together for the album, though, it was clear that they could speak the same musical language.
Further reading: From The Vault
Simon wasn’t the kind who was going to be able to sing scales in the same way that his bandmates could, but when you listen to ‘Under African Skies’, it’s one of the purest blends of pop and world music that has ever been. He didn’t give up his folk chops because when you think about it, this was folk music filtered through the lens of someone from another world entirely.
That’s what enticed so many people when Graceland first came out, and if we’re being completely honest, that’s what makes music so great to begin with. No one is influenced by any one genre for their entire lives, and the best thing that anyone can hope to do is find music that resonates with them in every single genre that they absorb.
