Here Comes Rhymin' Simon

Bud Scoppa

Few active artists have put as many miles on their odometers as Paul Simon, and this summer Warner Bros. will document a good chunk of the living legend’s musical journey with expanded reissues of all nine of his post-Simon & Garfunkel studio albums. It’ll be a three-stage release, starting with the limited-edition slipcase set Paul Simon: The Studio Recordings 1972-2000, coming June 29; the CDs will then be available individually, with the first five in stores July 13 and the rest following two weeks later.

While there isn’t a mother lode of previously unheard songs included in the series — only six new songs see the light of day for the first time — the overall musical and sound quality is uniformly high. Rhino’s Bill Inglot spent a great deal of time optimizing the original material, as well as the outtakes, alternate takes, demos, "works in progress" and, in two cases, live performances, that comprise the extras.

"I don’t want to get into the ‘Throw your old CDs away’ routine," Inglot tells ICE drolly, "but I’m pretty excited about how these records sound in general, especially the first couple or three. That’s not an indictment of the work that was done before, but I think we got it — we were able to find very good masters on all of these records."

Inglot spent close to two years poring over no less than 12,000 tapes in his search for viable unreleased material, a huge job made somewhat less arduous due to the fact that Simon’s well-organized archives are in his possession. As he conducted the initial screening, Inglot ran the material past Simon for his approval, the process eventually resulting in the cherry picking of 30 previously unreleased tracks, including many alternate versions.