"You're The One"

Warner Brothers 2000

Rhymin' Simon is back with another timeless masterpiece that will make you sit back and listen deeply. It's one those things that will stop you in your tracks and bring silence over a room.

The profound changes Paul Simon has undertaken since Simon & Garfunkel, a deep excursion into the realm of "world music"- mostly African and Brazilian influenced, have been most exciting . "Graceland" featured the multiple harmonies of Ladysmith Black Mambazo from South Africa and the press touted this as his first major departure into the world of musical diversity. Actually, Simon always had an ear for the world. Think back to "Cecilia" and the beat of "Me and Julio Down in the Schoolyard", how about the flute on "El Condor Pasa" ? After his first self-titled solo album Simon expanded his musical direction with "Graceland" and "Rhythm of the Saints", a percussion intensive journey to South America. Along the way he picked up Vincent Nguini on guitar and Bakithi Khumalo on bass, who join him on this album again. Then came "Capeman" the Broadway disaster and the album which essentially failed commercially and never took off on the radio- in part because a few of the really good songs violate FCC censorship rules.

Simon's work as a singer/songwriter is not just profound, but awe inspiring, and the title "You're The One and Only" fits to the man. Warner Brothers touts this record as "a hypnotically beautiful song cycle rich in emotion and energy- easily Simon's most accessible and melodic album in more than a decade."

They are essentially right- it's his best work since "Rhythm of the Saints" and he has placed the emphasis back on the stories, the rich lyricism, a melodic charm, gentle, easy and refined. The instrumentation remains distinctly African influenced. Nguini's guitar lays in percussive patterns, a subtle, rhythmic pulse, which many African guitarist tend to prefer over the Western tendency toward the lead solo.

Simon's "You're The One" is more about the idea, the lyrical statement, the stories, rather than the instrumentation. A journey into awareness. Here you have to listen to the meaning, the statements of a poet, father, philosopher, a wise man's sketches, the soul of ages. The ideas and stories that powerfully flow from this record are small truths, like a father talking to a child. Everything is so extraordinary simple here, slow and easy, with a ring of certainty, of gentle truths.

The beauty in this album rests in the interplay between the tones and vignettes Nguini lays behind Simon's brilliant and beautiful songs.

If I could play all the memories

In the neck of my guitar

I'd write a song called

"Senorita With A Necklace Of Tears"

and every tear a sin I'd committed

oh these many years

That's who I was

That's the way it's always been

Some People always want more

Some people are what they lack

Some people open a door

Walk away and never come back.

Simon speaks as one who knows of the impermanence, of the fragile gift of the few things that are really important and good in a short life- love, the inner quest for happiness and respect for - well, you know.