Now the years are rolling by me

By Adam Sweeting

The Guardian, September 29, 2000

Though the work of both Simon & Garfunkel and Paul Simon on his own have already been anthologised to death, this year’s Simon compilation, ‘Shining like a National guitar’, still wedged itself in the UK charts with limpet-like tenacity. ‘You’re the one’ is thus handly timed to cash in on a resurgence of interest in the tiny tunesmith from New York. However, if you’re not greatly enamoured of African music, you’re going to find the going tough, because once again Simon has assembled his new songs an assortment of Afro-flavoured rhythms and instrumental textures. To sum it up in a glib soundbite, you could say it’s not as good as ‘Graceland’ but better than ‘The rhythm of the saints’.

It’s not great surprise to find Simon expressing himself in somebody else’s ethnic vernacular, because he’s been doing it almost as long as he’s been a professional songwriter. Early in his career, he switched between doo-wop, rock’n’roll and folk music until he found something that worked, both commercially and artistically. Later, when he kicked off his solo career, he immersed himself in reggae and Puerto Rican music, then went exploring in gospel quartets and New Orleans brass bands. To his credir, he always managed to make his rainbow-hued musical hybrids convincing enough to persuade you to suspend your disbelief. Usually you weren’t even aware that there was any disbelief to suspend, since what the songs had to say seemed justification enough for the way that they said it. The storm he ran into with ‘Graceland’ in 1986 came about largely because Simon, always the perfectionist, had thrown himself into his South African adventure with too much artistic zeal and too little political savvy.

In contrast, what’s curious about ‘You’re the one’ is the way Simon has carried his African leanings back to metropolitan New York. Although he indulges in a sprawling range of quasimythical or metaphorical references, these aren’t songsthat locate themselves in a specific musical and gepgraphical location, like ‘Take me to the Mardi Gras’, or much of the ‘Graceland’ material.

Maybe Simon wanted to make a decisive break from his last album, his 1997 collection of songs from his musical ‘The Capeman’. Though several of the songs were terrific, the musical turned into the Titanic of Broadway, so probably the last thing its chastened author could bear was to return to the Hispanic and Latino influences that shaped the story.

The tone of voice here sounds more like the urban sophisticate of ‘Still crazy after all these years’ who, 25 years later, is now preoccupied with issues like growing old, reminiscing about adolescence and musing over faith and fidelity. Hence, from the opening track, ‘That’s where I belong’, there’s a sense of dislocation between form and content, as Simon sets off on some non-specific interior quest to an accompaniment centred on Vincent Nguini’s liquid guitar and Bakhiti Kumalo’s township-esque bassline.

These new songs work best when Simon is at his most specific and least fanciful. You can’t get a much more basic topic in pop music than love, and the song ‘Love’ is a simple ode to this stuff we take for granted –“all the while it’s free as air/ Like plants the medicine is everywhere”. The tune is slow and gentle with a hint of bossa nova, but what really makes it fly is Simon’s deployment of a sitar guitar, whose long, rangy phrases lend the piece a sense of languid inevitability.

‘Quiet’ is another fortuitous match of medium and message. In his elliptical way, Simon seems to be musing on death and assorted Last Things (“I am heading for a place of quiet/ Where the sage and sweet grass grow”). For the accompaniment, he has knocked together a combination of instruments including pump-reed organ, 96-tone harp and whirly pipe, about which all you need to know is that they conspire to evoke a plausible sense of distance and time, floated across a subtle undertone of menace.

The auteur is on much less secure ground when he gives rein to his penchant for blustering, verbose parables, which become decreasingly meaningful the longer they’re allowed to stagger on. Paticularly dislikeable is ‘The teacher’, which is killed stone dead by its opening line: “There once was a teacher of great renown/ Whose words were like the tablets of stone”. The ensuing tale about immigrants sleeping on “a quilt of stars” and sucking moisture from clouds is idiotic enough to merit inclusion in the Self-Parody Zone at the Millenium Dome. Also teetering on the edge of absurdity is ‘Señorita with a necklace of tears’, a po-faced catalogue of platitudes that would make a handy teaching aid for a mail-order course in spiritual enlightenment (money back if nirvana not attained within 30 days). Nor, I must admit, am I much smitten with the amusing political allegory of ‘Pigs, sheep and wolves’.

However, other worthwhile moments include the energetic Buddy Holly strum and the smart lyric of ‘Old’, the bittersweet saga of ‘Darling Lorraine’ and the deft cross-rhythms and subtle instrumental interplay of ‘Hurricane eye’. Paul Simon the craftsman will never let you down, but he should know by now that if you haven’t got anything worth saying, it’s best to shut up.