Guitar Tricks Insider February/March Digital Edition | Page 38

ACOUSTIC FEATURE

“Part of the impulse to write
is to have a catharsis. As the
writing continues you can get
into a little pocket where things
are coming easily. You find
yourself with this inexplicable
flow of images, ideas, thoughts
that are interesting. You also
have to have a very low level of
critical faculty operating.”

records since I was 15. That’s my profession.
You start to make a track, and all of a sudden
it’s got a great feel to it. A kind of magic
happens that you couldn’t have predicted. ‘Let’s
pull out all the stops and make an AM record’ –
that sentence comes up a lot in the studio.
“Paradoxically, Bridge over Troubled Water
was our most intense success; but it was the
end of Simon & Garfunkel. As the relationship
was disintegrating, the album was selling ten
million copies. And by the time I decided I was
going to go out on my own – you can imagine
how difficult it was telling the record company
there wasn’t going to be any follow-up to an
album that sold ten million – But for me it really
saved my ass, because I don’t think we could
have followed it up.”
More than that, Simon didn’t want to continue
writing the way he was writing. “For me the
significant change occurred around 1969, after
I wrote ‘The Boxer.’ At that point I stopped
smoking grass and I never went back. I told a
friend of mine – a really good musician – that I
had writer’s block. And he said, ‘When are you
going to stop playing this folkie stuff all the time
– the same G-to-C chords? You could be a really
good songwriter, but you don’t know enough.
You don’t have enough tools. Forget about
having hits. Go learn your ax. I started to study
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DIGITAL EDITION

theory. I began listening to other kinds of music
– gospel, Jamaican ska, Antonio Carlos Jobim.
‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ was a gospelinfluenced song. It was very easy for me to feel
at home with gospel because it sounded like the
rock ‘n’ roll I grew up with in the early fifties.”
Throughout the ‘70s, Paul Simon managed
to stay acutely in touch with his audience as he
attempted to transcend terminal adolescence
through rock ‘n’ roll. “I write about the past
a lot – my childhood and my first marriage. I
didn’t set out to write about the disintegration
of a marriage. It’s just that that was happening
at the time. I guess I have an easier time
expressing myself in a song than in real life. I
can say things in a song that I would never say
otherwise. It’s a way of telling the truth, but
not intentionally. It just turns out that way.” But
whether Simon is reflecting on the past (“My
Little Town”), feeling lost and disenfranchised
(“American Tune”), commenting on a marriage
gone awry (“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”) or
a personality run amok (“Still Crazy After All
These Years”), he was uniquely attuned to the
concerns of growing up in this time and place.
Still, he remained unsatisfied. “Most of the
time what I’m writing is about music, not about
lyrics, and critics pay scant attention to the
music. I mean, if you’re saying something with
FEB/MAR