Obviously, Leaving Your Lover and Going to Graceland

Allow to me briefly interrupt this summer heat wave for some music-related thoughts.

I think I've figured out something about Paul Simon. He certainly isn't always a great lyricist, but he has put out pretty consistently compelling records for about 45 years, no small feat. I've figured out his secret, though. He just works with really great musicians who supply him with absolute grooves of doom that would be impossible for any musician to mess up.

He talks about this in the excellent documentary about Graceland. I'll skip going into a full lecture/rehash of that album, but suffice it to say that much of that record consisted of Simon "jamming" with South African musicians, laying down backing tracks, and then writing his lyrics and vocal part later. (It seems likely that the South Africans were responsible for many of the most important musical elements of his songs, but didn't receive writing credits or royalties.) For the title track, he even says in the documentary something to the effect of, "I didn't even want to write a vocal part for it, the track was so good, I thought we should just put the track out--no way to improve on that." Nevertheless, he did write lyrics for the song, which are OK, at least. (I think the song is about driving to Tennessee, Catharine thinks it's about redemption. I'm sure one of us is right.) But, to me at least, the lyrics really still feel quite incidental. I think he was right, he could have just put the backing track out.

Same deal with a song from about a decade earlier. "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover" features a brilliant snare drum groove from master percussionist Steve Gadd. I mean, really, it's one of the great drum grooves in history.



In comparison, Simon's lyrics and his vocal performance seem rather, um, wimpy. And I'm always disappointed when the song goes to the chorus (the "Slip out the back, Jack" part) and the groove changes to kind of a lame attempt at funk. Thankfully, the main groove always comes back.

The other example of this is "The Obvious Child," Simon's collaboration with samba-reggae extraordinaires Olodum. The groove that they cook up is so compelling that Simon could have written nearly anything for the lyrics and chords and it would have been a hit.

Perhaps it's telling that these are my three favorite Paul Simon songs and the parts that I like the best seem not to have really been created by Paul Simon. I'm not sure that I would rank Simon among my favorite pop musicians of the last 45 years. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't. Still, there's something to be said for getting musicians together, letting them fall into a nice groove, and staying (mostly) the hell out of the way. There's definitely a kind of genius in that.