Dear All,
I decided to listen to this as a way of killing time this evening.
Well what a fantastic hour it was. I was surely disturbing the neighbors as i sang along to all his songs. Funny how many i had forgotten about , but was still able to join in.
He is 70 years young soon, which makes me reflect that i have been listening to him since the 60's so that is the vast proportion of my life.
He has had a massive influence on music be that folk country pop and international. He has an amazing use of rhythm, and his lyrics are full of meaning. They have stories which are worth listening to.
So i really ought to look out and listen to the records and cd's that i have.
As you can tell i did enjoy the program.
David
Posted on: 02 May 2011 by Guido Fawkes
> and his lyrics are full of meaning
even more than that he likes to use words that sound right - I saw a session that he did when making Graceland and although the lyric worked and the meaning was right, Paul was unhappy with the sound of the words and everything had to be done again until it worked. The attention to detail is amazing. The list of bad Paul Simon records is very short indeed - in fact, it's blank; if it wasn't any good he'd throw it out no matter how much time he'd invested in it.
Glad you enjoyed listen to him talk and of course the songs.
All the best, Guy
Posted on: 02 May 2011 by Ron Toolsie
Paul Simon (like Madonna) has always strived to reinvent himself musically. Instead of choosing to plow the the same old folk musical rut, he decided to abandon conventional western folk-pop for a more world-music genre. The problem is he seemed to have lost a lot of tonal complexity and depth in an attempt to introduce more 'beaty' rhythms. For instance, if you were to look at the complex chord structure '50 ways to leave your lover' this is obviously *not* pop music, nor is its time signature particularly pop friendly. Yet the melody and timing is absolutely compulsive and somehow manage to compensate for the uncharacteristically simplistic lyrics. And about any track from 'There goes Rhymin Simon' is superior to anything on Graceland (IMHO). One of his much underlooked gems is the soundtrack from 'One Trick Pony' which again eclipses his later works in pure musical terms, but probably generated less than 1% of the sales of his more commercially successful albums.
Somewhere on YouTube is a clip of him performing the Davey Graham standard 'Anji' along with his near-identical-twin brother (its near impossible to know which Simon is which ), providing ample evidence that he is nobody's fool when it comes to being an instrumental virtuoso....a fact that again seems to be ignored in his later works in favour of the beat.
Posted on: 03 May 2011 by BigH47
We just listened via Player. Interesting chap, I always though he came over a bit into himself, but in this interview he was very "normal".
Not sure his boy is his greatest achievement, but his catlogue ceryainly is.
