![\"Paul](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Paul-Simon-Musician-2018-Matthew-Straubmuller-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ Matthew Straubmuller)<\/p>\n
Sat 15 November 2025 16:30, UK <\/p>\n
For a songwriter like Paul Simon<\/a>, the importance of all great songwriting comes from a lot of patience.\u00a0<\/p>\n As much as people can come up with a tune on a whim and create the greatest melody anyone has ever heard, sometimes it stirs in someone\u2019s mind for years before they\u2019re finally ready to share it with the world. It can be anywhere from weeks to months to even years, but sometimes Simon could take the perfect melody and give the smash hit treatment centuries after it came out.<\/p>\n Then again, Simon was always fairly consistent when it came to releasing his records. While his more recent work does have more than a few hiccups due to his health struggles, his run throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s with Graceland was enough to leave Simon and Garfunkel as a distant memory. But the key to Simon\u2019s success wasn\u2019t only about writing great songs. It was about searching for the next kind of music that was out there.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s not to say that Simon was hopping on trends, either. He was never going to play the MTV game and strut up and down a music video set in spandex, but he could find ways to twist his sound into different directions. There was a lot more the music world had to offer other than folk-rock, and the next few years saw him taking elements of everything from jazz to South African music and beginning to incorporate them into his sound.<\/p>\n Although some of them came together with a bit of a thud, it\u2019s not like Simon was ever afraid to try something new. Even as far back as Simon and Garfunkel, he could throw in the odd tune that messed with the usual formula like \u2018A Simple Desultory Phillipic\u2019, and judging by how brilliant his ballads were, it was no surprise that he took a few cues from classic music along the way.<\/p>\n There was already a Bach piece that he borrowed heavily from when working on \u2018Bridge Over Troubled Water\u2019<\/a>, but when telling the story of his own influences, he knew that all the credit didn\u2019t belong to him. Bach helped him with \u2018American Tune\u2019, and even with a few embellishments, Simon was proud to be the one to bring the song \u2018Scarborough Fair\u2019 to the masses when working on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.<\/p>\n