Just occasionally a snippet of information can catch you unawares. Like this one: Paul Simon — a musician synonymous with the bustle of the New York suburbs, where he grew up in the Fifties, the baseball-mad son of Hungarian-Jewish parents — lives on a ranch in Texas.
Which is where we are today. That this east coast liberal has swapped city life, which inspired so much of his writing, for the wide open spaces of the Lone Star State seems bewildering. Yet there are reasons for his splendid isolation in this place where the only sound, bar the birdsong, is of silence.
Not least the calamitous event of a kind that all musicians dread. During our conversation Simon reveals to me the sudden loss of hearing he has suffered in one ear, which explains his need for peace and quiet. Then there are the intimations of mortality that thrum through his new album, Seven Psalms, and his remarkable burst of late-career creativity.
“Boy, have I been beaten up in these last couple of years,” says Simon, who will turn 82 in October and is recovering from a nasty bout of Covid. A heartbeat of a pause. “But I look good, right?” he adds, a twinkle in his eye.
That twinkle will, over the course of two hours, sometimes give way to tears. His recent illness has left him physically frail, but he is in every other respect agile and robust, quipping and riffing, going down memory lane one minute, detailing plans for more new music the next.
Advertisement
Simon belongs in the top tier of 20th-century songwriters, a chronicler of America and the human condition every bit as acute and important as Dylan. His first act came with Art Garfunkel, his second as a huge solo artist in the Seventies. His third helped to bring world music into the mainstream with Graceland, his Grammy-winning 1986 album, which sold more than 16 million copies. That would be enough for most musicians. Now, with the clock ticking, comes a fourth act in a career littered with milestones.
“I’m not drawn back to New York at all,” Simon tells me on a tour of his ranch. “I’m happy here or winter in Hawaii [where he has a house]. I don’t want to be in cold weather if I can help it.” A vintage Ford pick-up truck sits on the gravel; scrub and woodland stretch as far as the eye can see. The main house overlooks the creek and a cabin that houses Simon’s studio, where much of Seven Psalms was recorded.
In conversation Simon veers between lofty verbal formulations that attest to a lifetime of being listened to intently and taken very seriously, and moments when he slips unexpectedly into the rhythms and patterns of his home city or drops a phrase that could be one of his lyrics. At one point, discussing how he knows instinctively when something sounds wrong, Simon suggests that “the ear goes to the irritant”, a phrase that isn’t a million miles from You Can Call Me Al’s “incidents and accidents”.
Part of the explanation for his move here is that Simon’s wife, the singer Edie Brickell, 57, with whom he has a daughter and two sons, hails from Texas (Simon has another son, the songwriter Harper Simon, from his first marriage). They bought the ranch at roughly the same time as Simon sold his publishing rights to Sony for a rumoured $250 million — although with 130 million career record sales, he hardly needed the money.
Later, reflecting on the Simon & Garfunkel years and going full New York, he says: “When we were kids Artie used to say, ‘What would have happened if The Sound of Silence wasn’t a hit? What would have happened to us?’ My answer was always, ‘I never think about it because it was a hit and always will be a hit, and the other scenario? It didn’t happen. So how much time do you want to spend thinking about something that never happened?’ ”
Advertisement
His trail of memories is a long one, full of tangents, triumphs and tiffs and stretching all the way back to 1953, when Simon met Garfunkel aged 11 at primary school. Together they would conquer the charts with songs such as The Boxer, America and Bridge over Troubled Water, before falling out. Despite sporadic reunions (they last played together in 2010 in New Orleans), they never quite patched up their differences. While Simon has retreated to Texas, Garfunkel, the self-described “weird blond kid”, remains an oddball traveller at 81, crossing continents on foot and obsessively listing his reading material on his website.
In an interview in 2015 Garfunkel didn’t mince his words when discussing his split from Simon in 1970, describing his estranged partner as a “jerk”. Speaking the following year, Simon, who wrote the majority of their songs, responded with cutting condescension. “It’s done. It’s old music, it ends in 1970, and if it’s not fun, there’s no point. And it’s not fun. If you get close to him, you’ll be in the battle, and you’ll get hit.”
We sit in his studio, Simon wearing jeans, a pale blue shirt and a baseball cap. On the wall behind him hangs his first acoustic guitar, battered and stringless, which his father, a musician, bought for him when he was 12. In the adjoining control room is a framed copy of Hey Schoolgirl, the single he and Garfunkel released in 1957 under the name Tom & Jerry, which reached No 49 on the Billboard chart. Above it is a photograph of the pair performing.
On another wall is the sheet of lined A4 paper, also framed, on which Simon scribbled the words “Seven Psalms” after waking from a dream on January 15, 2019. That the album title came to him in a dream on the anniversary of his father’s death only heightens the sense of a record haunted by themes of memory, impermanence and faith. It is as if Simon is tackling the big questions that can no longer be avoided.
“The dream was specific,” he says. “‘You are writing, or are meant to write, a piece called Seven Psalms.’ It was a very insistent statement, so much so that I wrote it down. And the next day I looked at the Bible and thought, ‘Well, the piece isn’t going to be like this.’ And then it was a case of, ‘Well, what is it going to be like? I have no idea, but then it wasn’t my idea anyway. I’ll just wait here until I have more information.’ ”
Advertisement
Seven Psalms is emphatically not a religious album. Rather, it investigates questions of belief and reflects on how these shape our attitudes to life and mortality. So many veteran musicians continue to release records long after you wish they had hung up their guitars. Simon is an exception. Seven Psalms also harks back to the spare, fingerpicked style of The Paul Simon Songbook, the album he recorded during his formative six-month immersion in the British folk scene in 1964-5, a period that produced the song Homeward Bound. He escaped New York after the failure of Simon & Garfunkel’s debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 am, and restored his faith in his abilities as a writer by performing in folk clubs.
The intricacy of Simon’s new songs is extraordinary. You have no choice but to lean right in. “If you invite the ear to listen on a very subtle level,” Simon says, “you can get the listener to listen harder, more acutely, and what you are saying lyrically has a greater chance of having the impact you would like it to have. The mind and the heart are opened by concentration.”
The lyrics came after the guitar pieces, many of them in dreams from which Simon would wake in the small hours to jot them down. Later, painstakingly, he worked on bringing them together. The early part of this process coincided with a life-changing moment. “Quite suddenly I lost most of the hearing in my left ear, and nobody has an explanation for it. So everything became more difficult. My reaction to that was frustration and annoyance; not quite anger yet, because I thought it would pass, it would repair itself.”
It has yet to do so, which makes any prospect of a return to live performance extremely dim. Perhaps, Simon muses, that’s no bad thing. “The songs of mine that I don’t want to sing live, I don’t sing them. Sometimes there are songs that I like and then at a certain point in a tour, I’ll say, ‘What the f*** are you doing, Paul?’ Quite often that would come during You Can Call Me Al. I’d think, ‘What are you doing? You’re like a Paul Simon cover band. You should get off the road, go home.’”
Listening to Wait, the final song of Seven Psalms, it dawns on you that the whole album has been leading to this point. The realisation came to Simon, too, as he was working on the song, and it hit him hard.
Advertisement
“Wait,” the first verse goes. “I’m not ready, I’m just packing my gear/ Wait/ My hand’s steady/ My mind is still clear.” His wife duets with him in the final passage. “Heaven is beautiful/ It’s almost like home/ Children, get ready/ It’s time to come home.” It ends with a harmonised “Amen” and tolling bells. The effect is shattering; you can almost sense the drawing of a final breath.
“It’s a spooky thing to be writing something and just be thinking, ‘Oh, this is what the song needs,’” Simon says, his eyes filling with tears. “And then it’s, ‘By the way, this is about you. You’re actually the subject of this.’” He pauses. “It’s just the age we’re at. Gordon Lightfoot just passed away; Jeff Beck too. My generation’s time is up.”
Maybe. And yet, two days after we meet, Simon will sit down with the drummer Steve Gadd to work on a new song. Even as the clock ticks, he’s still creating, after all these years. Seven Psalms is out now
What’s your favourite song by Paul Simon? Let us know in the comments below.
