{"id":293627,"date":"2025-12-01T20:15:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T20:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/293627\/"},"modified":"2025-12-01T20:15:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T20:15:09","slug":"the-one-singer-paul-simon-said-wouldnt-be-remembered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/293627\/","title":{"rendered":"The one singer Paul Simon said wouldn’t be remembered"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Paul<\/p>\n

(Credits: Harry Chase, Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Mon 1 December 2025 18:30, UK <\/p>\n

Nothing that Paul Simon<\/a> ever made ever came from thinking about his place in the world. <\/p>\n

All great songs are the ones that end up becoming evergreen, thanks to the human emotion that people put into them, rather than the trends they were keeping up with or the strange risks they took. While Simon certainly did manage to defy people\u2019s expectations every so often when he played, he did feel like being remembered as one of the greatest composers of the past century was beside the point.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that he isn\u2019t proud of his work, though. \u2018The Sound of Silence\u2019 is one of the songs that he claimed would be remembered over a century later, but that still comes from the fact that anyone could feel those same feelings he was talking about. No one was a stranger to that sense of unease, but Simon also didn\u2019t feel like he needed to live vicariously through that song for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n

Because for all great artists, their goal is to make songs that speak to the time they were living rather than reaching the charts. None of the songwriters before the days of pop charts were all that concerned with recapturing the same magic every time they wrote a song, and whether someone was singing the blues or listening to the smoothest jazz anyone had ever laid down, it was understood that each performance was bound to sound completely different. <\/p>\n

Even a lot of Simon\u2019s heroes were doing the same thing. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan<\/a> definitely had their fair share of albums that were being done to capitalise on a certain market, but if you were to look through their records in chronological order, they do a better picture at telling one long, epic journey than focusing on a specific place and time when they were writing their classics.<\/p>\n

And no one managed to paint a more colourful picture of their career than Prince. From day one, he was always looking to take music in any direction that he wanted to, and while his work in the 1980s will forever be immortalised, the amount of material that he was able to crank out throughout his career made each new endeavour feel like one additional notch on his belt than one musical peak.<\/p>\n

But upon hearing of his passing, Simon said that \u2018The Purple One\u2019 would probably be forgotten the minute after people stopped reporting on his death, saying<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m not that interested in my legacy. I didn\u2019t do this so everyone would applaud for me when I\u2019m dead. I did it because I was really interested in solving a musical problem, because I selfishly was getting a lot of pleasure out of doing this. I\u2019m glad of the fact other people like it, and say thank you. I didn\u2019t do it for you, but I\u2019m glad you like it. So when I think about Prince\u2019s legacy, I think the truth is next week it won\u2019t be a story. And I doubt that he would even care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then again, that\u2019s not a case of Simon wanting to put down what Prince did. There\u2019s no doubt that he created spellbinding music that no one else could have thought of, but even if no one had heard a single note that he played, the important thing for Simon was that his fellow rock and roll legend was able to make the kind of records that satisfied him over everybody else in his field. <\/p>\n

There is no shortage of Prince fans who will pore over every single record he made to get the full story of his life, but as far as Simon was concerned, it was never about how well an artist\u2019s music is preserved. It\u2019s about whether they have made the statement that they wanted to in the time that they have, and if they fulfilled that, who cares what anyone else thought?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Harry Chase, Los Angeles Times) Mon 1 December 2025 18:30, UK Nothing that Paul Simon ever made…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,37050,30646,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-293627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-paul-simon","11":"tag-prince","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}