ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
May 16, 2006
By COLETTE BANCROFT
His new album faces the approach of old age with the same wit, melody and musical exploration fans have come to expect.
It has to be a pain in the neck to go through life labeled the voice of your generation, but Paul Simon has borne that burden with humor and grace.
The latest evidence is his first new release in six years, Surprise.
Once an elfin Wunderkind who in 1965 shot to stardom, along with Art Garfunkel, with the release of the single The Sound of Silence, Simon is now 64.
Just as his early songs reflected the angst and anger of young people in the 1960s, and his 1986 masterpiece Graceland expanded beyond the self-absorption of youth to the woes and wonders of the larger world, in Surprise Simon brings tuneful insight to the approach of old age and the shadow of death.
That is emphatically not to say it's a depressing album. Simon is as witty and buoyant, and as full of glorious melodies, as ever. His fluid, light, intimate tenor shrugs off the years.
And he is still a musical explorer, spicing his songs with African and Latin rhythms, gospel, jazz, doo-wop and hip-hop. For Surprise, he teamed with Brian Eno, co-founder of Roxy Music, pioneer of ambient music and legendary producer for such acts as David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2.
Eno is credited on this album not for producing but for "sonic environment," which includes everything from densely layered percussion on some tracks to the coda of Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean, where a moment of transcendent nostalgia is trailed by the faint sound of a church organ heard at impossible distance.
There are songs about the young on Surprise, filled with tender hope. Another Galaxy is the story of a bride who runs away from her wedding, "leaving all the yellow roses." The tune's norteno-tinged guitar is mournful, but the rhythms underneath drive the song forward into her future.
Father and Daughter, the Oscar-nominated song Simon wrote for the movie The Wild Thornberrys, is an utterly sweet lullaby to a beloved child, bouncing on a sunny Caribbean beat.
But most of the characters in Simon's songs are at the other end of life, all too aware that, as one of them sings, "Forgotten is a long, long time."
Outrageous is a wry old guy's rap, a percussive recitation of all the stuff that drives him crazy, everything from those who "line their pockets off the misery of the poor" to public school food. "Anybody care what I say?" he barks, then answers himself sharply: "No." Its wistful chorus is every baby boomer's question: "Who's gonna love ya when your looks are gone?"
That's Me starts out as irascible autobiography: "Well, I'll just skip the boring parts." But its cranky first couple of verses give way to a lyrical memory of an unforgettable first love, and Eno's sonic environment blooms with it.
The somber, lovely Wartime Prayers is not a soldier's plea but the meditation of a man distant from the conflict, yet unable to think of anything else.
He doesn't welcome the emotions the war awakens: "I want to rid my heart of envy and cleanse my soul of rage before I'm through." But he's haunted by the image of a mother kissing her sleeping babies "to drive away despair/she says a wartime prayer."
The speaker in Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean itches to throw off his responsibilities, dump the job and family, "shake every limb in the Garden of Eden, and make every lover the love of my life."
But his break for freedom is stopped short by a "letter from home/The handwriting's fragile and strange/Something unstoppable put into motion/Nothing is different but everything's changed."
Connection - to family, to the past, to the larger world, to the universe - is the force that holds life together in these songs, and beyond. For most of Simon's speakers, the closer they come to leaving the world, the more beautiful it becomes.
In I Don't Believe, he sings, "I don't believe we were born to be sheep in a flock, to pantomime prayers with the hands of a clock."
And it isn't hope for a religious vision of the afterlife that sustains him, but the quotidian world:
On a clear summer evening
As soft as a kiss
My children are laughing
Not a whisper of care.
My love is brushing her long chestnut hair.
I don't believe
A heart can be filled to the brim
Then vanish like mist
As though life were a whim.