Paul Simon: Education and Musical Influences

Paul Frederic Simon, born on October 13, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist celebrated for his solo work and his collaborations with Art Garfunkel. Simon's career, spanning seven decades, is punctuated by phenomenal commercial success and critical acclaim, solidifying his place as one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the rock era. His music has left an indelible mark on popular culture, blending folk, rock, and world music influences into a unique and enduring sound.

Early Life and Education

Born in Newark, New Jersey, to Hungarian-Jewish parents, Paul Simon's upbringing in Queens, New York City, significantly shaped his musical trajectory. His father, Louis, was a professor of education at the City College of New York, a double bass player, and a dance bandleader. His mother, Belle, was an elementary school teacher. The musician Donald Fagen described Simon's childhood as that of "a certain kind of New York Jew, almost a stereotype really, to whom music and baseball are very important… The parents are either immigrants or first-generation Americans who felt like outsiders, and assimilation was the key thought-they gravitated to black music and baseball, looking for an alternative culture." Simon acknowledged the accuracy of Fagen's description.

After graduating from Forest Hills High School, Simon majored in English at Queens College, graduating in 1963. In 1970, Simon taught songwriting at New York University, hoping to help people avoid some of the mistakes he had made.

Early Musical Influences

Simon's early exposure to music was diverse. He was interested in the jazz his father played, but also in folk, doo wop and soul. He recalls hearing "Gee" by The Crows on Make Believe Ballroom: "It was really the first thing I heard on there that I liked. And it was really the first time I heard rock and roll." Simon tried to explain to his father the feeling he got hearing "Earth Angel": "My father was a very good musician. And he comes from an era of very sophisticated music. Big bands, and Sinatra … He didn't buy it." Infatuated with teenage street music in the mid-1950s, he returned throughout his career to the wellspring of dreamy doo-wop vocal harmony for inspiration and refreshment.

He met Art Garfunkel when he was 11, and the two began singing together. In 1954, Simon heard Elvis Presley for the first time, and began to play the guitar as a result, because he wanted to become a rock ‘n roll star. Garfunkel was equally inspired by the new rock ‘n roll music. A year later, Simon and Garfunkel took on the name Tom and Jerry, and in 1957, they recorded a song written by Simon called “Hey, Schoolgirl,” which was released on Big Records.

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Simon noted the doo-wop groups of the 1950s, Elvis Presley and particularly the Everly Brothers, saying he was in awe of Phil and Don Everly as a teen, calling them the "best-sounding duo" he had ever heard. Artie and I, we really learned to sing harmony by learning the Everly Brothers. And their model was the Louvin Brothers. Don and Phil, for me, are still the best of all of the duos - better than Artie and me, better than John and Paul - just astonishingly great. Their sound was something that we strived for, that kind of buzz that you get, you know, when the blend is just right. You couldn’t tell who was singing lead because both parts were so beautiful and sung so beautifully. So Artie and I, as we were learning the Everly Brothers, we were also unconsciously learning the Louvins.

Simon & Garfunkel Era

As a teenager, Simon teamed up with his classmate from Queens, New York, Art Garfunkel, to form Simon and Garfunkel (first known as Tom and Jerry). Beginning with “The Sounds of Silence,” they were the most popular folk-pop duo of the 1960s and the musical darlings of literary-minded college-age baby boomers. Simon’s best early songs tended to be bookish angst-ridden reveries with simple folk rock melodies and earnest, poetically ambitious (but often mannered) lyrics, some influenced by Bob Dylan.

Their blend of folk and rock, including hits such as "The Sound of Silence" (1965), "Mrs. Robinson" (1968), "America" (1968), and "The Boxer" (1969), served as a soundtrack to the 1960s counterculture. In 1967, film director Mike Nichols asked the duo to write songs for a film he was shooting, The Graduate. Simon’s song “Mrs Robinson,” became closely associated with the movie. Bookends became Simon & Garfunkel’s first American and British number one album. A complete version of “Mrs. The duo managed to surpass Bookends with their next and final studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, which ended up becoming one of the most lauded albums of all time. Released in January 1970, it went to number 1 in dozens of countries around the world, and 8 times platinum in the US and 11 times platinum in the UK.

Simon built a following performing in folk clubs around the country, and CBS asked him to record a solo album. All songs were recorded with just one microphone for Simon’s vocals and acoustic guitar.

Solo Career and World Music Exploration

When Simon and Garfunkel split in 1970, Simon launched a successful solo career, marked by his fierce commitment to following an artistic path driven wherever his muse has taken him - a path that has led him to cultures and musical traditions from around the world. His songwriting has incorporated reggae, Peruvian folk songs, New Orleans brass bands, and traditional gospel choirs.

Simon's next album, Paul Simon, was released in January 1972. It featured an early experiment with world music, the reggae-inspired "Mother and Child Reunion", recorded with Jimmy Cliff's band. It reached both the American and British Top 5. The album received universal acclaim and critics praised its variety of styles and confessional lyrics. Simon's next project, the pop-folk album There Goes Rhymin' Simon, was released in May 1973. Other songs like "American Tune" and "Something So Right" (a tribute to Simon's first wife, Peggy) became part of his repertoire. The album reached number 1 on the Cashbox album charts. His next album, produced by Simon and Phil Ramone, was Still Crazy After All These Years, released in October 1975. The mood of the album, written after Simon's divorce, was darker. It contains "Gone at Last", a duet with Phoebe Snow, and the Simon & Garfunkel reunion track "My Little Town" (a number 9 on Billboard). Simon wrote the song for Garfunkel, whose solo output Simon felt lacked "bite", and it was included on Garfunkel's album Breakaway. The album is his only number 1 on the Billboard charts to date. The 18th Grammy Awards named it the Album of the Year, and his performance on it the year's Best Male Pop Vocal.

Simon's fascination with pop vocal sound quickly expanded to include the sparkle of English folk music, the ethereal pipes and voices of Andean mountain music, and the arching passion of gospel. He traveled extensively, and visited Jamaica. “Mother and Child Reunion” was released in January 1972 as the lead single of his forthcoming self-titled solo album. The Latin-influenced song “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” was engineered by Phil Ramone, who was on his way to become one of the great legends of the American music world. For his next album, Simon tried out several new co-producers, with Roy Halee only playing a part in two songs. Phil Ramone co-produced four songs, and Paul Samwell-Smith one. Simon hit the first creative and commercial peak of his solo career with his next album, Still Crazy After All These Years, which was released in October 1975, and enormously successful.

Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints

When his popularity began to ebb, Simon jumped on the emerging world-music bandwagon. On a visit to South Africa, he met many of the musicians with whom he made Graceland (1986), an exquisite multifaceted fusion of his own sophisticated stream-of-consciousness poetry with black South Africa’s doo-wop-influenced “township jive” and Zulu choral music. Although some accused him of cultural thievery-i.e., the appropriation and exploitation of another culture’s music-the album was one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful of the decade and helped put South African music on the world stage.

Simon decided to record an album of South African music after hearing a bootlegged tape of mbaqanga, South African street music, and in 1986 he traveled to Johannesburg and recorded with African musicians. Simon recalls that "I improvised in two ways - by making up melodies in falsetto, and by singing any words that came to mind down in my lower and mid range. I tried not to censor the words and to keep an ear cocked to see if a phrase came out that was interesting enough to suggest that my subconscious had allowed something significant to bubble out. Though I had no intentions of writing about Elvis Presley, the word 'Graceland' came very early. While writing the lyrics, I always tried to stay true to the mood of the music, which was flowing, pleasant and easy." Stephen Holden wrote "Listening to Graceland, one gets the sense of an artist submitting to, and being swept up by, musical forces he does not totally understand. Adding a crucial extra dimension to the album is Mr. Simon's very urbane literary sensibility, which pulls against the simplicity of the music and lends the songs a kind of double vision. The music extends and enriches the language while the lyrics meditate on the music." It is estimated to have sold more than 16 million copies worldwide. Graceland won the 1987 Grammy for Album of the Year.

After Graceland, Simon extended his roots with the Brazilian-flavored The Rhythm of the Saints. Sessions for the album began in December 1989 in Rio de Janeiro and New York and featured guitarist J.J. Cale and Brazilian and African musicians. The album's tone is more introspective and low-key than that of Graceland. and number 1 in the UK. The lead single, "The Obvious Child", featuring the Grupo Cultural Olodum, became Simon's last Top 20 hit in the UK and appeared near the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100. Although not as successful as Graceland, The Rhythm of the Saints received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year.

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Simon made a similar pilgrimage to Brazil to record Rhythm of the Saints (1990), an even denser (and somewhat less popular) fusion of African-derived percussion with American folk rock. Its quirky nonlinear lyrics were indebted to the language of the Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean poet Derek Walcott.

The Capeman

Walcott became Simon’s collaborator on The Capeman, Simon’s first Broadway musical, which opened in January 1998 and was a critical and commercial failure. Based on a highly publicized 1959 New York City murder involving a Puerto Rican street gang, The Capeman featured a score by Simon (Walcott collaborated on the lyrics) that was a theatrical elaboration of the New York street music that had originally inspired him. But it also emphasized the long-underappreciated Hispanic contribution to urban pop. Simon collaborated with poet Derek Walcott on a musical, The Capeman, that opened on January 29, 1998. He worked enthusiastically on the project for many years, and described it as "a New York Puerto Rican story based on events that happened in 1959-events that I remembered." The musical told the story of a real-life Puerto Rican youth, Salvador Agron, who wore a cape while committing two murders in New York in 1959. He became a writer while in prison. Featuring Marc Anthony as the young Agron and Rubén Blades as the older Agron, the play was not a success, receiving mixed reviews and poor box-office receipts. Clive Barnes wrote "Here is the most bewitching and bewitched Broadway score in years -- music that, in a quite different way, only Stephen Sondheim has equaled," but that "it was West Side Story particularized, de-prettified and de-balleticized. Simon recorded an album of songs from the show which was released in November 1997. The album received mixed reviews.

Later Work and Musical Style

In 1999 Simon teamed with Bob Dylan for a summer tour in the United States. The concert series, which ended Simon’s eight-year absence from the road, marked the first time the two performers formally worked together. Later that year Simon continued on a solo tour, and in 2000 released You’re the One, an understated and introspective album that was a departure from the expansive sound of Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints. Simon tried to revive his stalling career with You’re The One, which was released in October 2000.

Simon continued to integrate new influences into his work, and he enlisted electronic music legend Brian Eno for Surprise (2006). In addition to cowriting three of the songs on Surprise, Eno was credited with creating the album’s “sonic landscape”-a rich layering of electronic instrumentation and rhythms that complemented Simon’s lyrics. It took six years for Simon’s next album to appear. Called Surprise, it was a collaboration with the legendary Brian Eno, known for his work with Roxy Music, U2 and Talking Heads.

Simon followed with So Beautiful or So What (2011), an album that was billed as a return to traditional songwriting. If Still Crazy After All These Years was a thirty-something’s commentary on middle age, So Beautiful or So What was a meditation on mortality by an artist approaching his 70th birthday. Stylistically, it was something of a career retrospective, incorporating the story-song lyricism of the Simon and Garfunkel years, the African sounds of Graceland, and the pop sensibility with which he had always flirted. Simon reunited with Phil Ramone for his twelfth solo album, So Beautiful or So What. It marked the first time since Hearts and Bones in 1983 that Simon wrote songs again just him singing with an acoustic guitar.

Stranger to Stranger (2016) was an experimental mélange of rhythmic instruments and textures that drew inspiration from eclectic composer Harry Partch. He was interested in the work of 20th-century composer Harry Partch, who composed microtonally, closely looking at the range within each note. Partch contended the western scale of 12 notes in an octave was actually 36 notes and did not fully represent the range of notes. Partch invented instruments to play microtonal intervals. Simon had an opportunity to play and record with these instruments for the new songs he is working on. On In the Blue Light (2018), Simon reworked several of his lesser-known songs through a jazz lens.

Among songwriters of his generation, Simon enjoyed one of the longest-lasting careers as a pop innovator. Searching out and exploring the sounds of indigenous musical cultures, from Southern gospel to Brazilian and West African percussion, he integrated them into American rock and folk styles to create a highly flexible, personalized style of world music that was at once primitive and elegant.

Seven Psalms

Five years and a pandemic later, in June of this year, Seven Psalms was released. The album is entirely acoustic, with the seven psalms segued into a single 33-minute long piece. Seven Psalms album comes across like an afterthought to an already incredibly long and rich career. I was driving along with my wife Edie, and we were listening to a piece and I said ‘that instrument is beautiful, what it is?’ It turned out it was a viola da gamba, so I looked up some pieces that were played on it, and one piece in particular was called Canzonetta spirituale by Merula, just for theorbo and viola da gamba. The viola da gamba was just paying two notes, but it was affecting the chord change, and the simplicity of the thing really captivated me. It was around this time that I had a strange dream. I woke up the next day and wrote it down. It was on January 15, 2019, and the dream said: 'you're supposed to write a piece called Seven Psalms'. I wasn't writing anything at the time, nor was I thinking about writing anything. I had done what I thought was probably going to be my last live performance, at least for a while. And then this dream happened, and I thought: I'm not sure I even know what a psalm is. Shortly after that I began to write little guitar pieces, and they grew into more developed pieces, and that went on for about a year. And then I started waking up during the middle of the night two or three times a week, between 3.30 and 5am, and words would come. So I knew this was one of those experiences that I've had at least several times in my life, where something occurs, but where I have no idea of its origin - and it just simply comes through me. The first one would probably be ‘The Sound of Silence’. I was 22 years old when I wrote it, so I had no idea what I was doing. I’d recorded the song ‘Insomniac’s Lullaby’ with a few of the Harry Partch instruments, including the cloud bowls, and while there I had sampled them, so I started to lay the cloud bowls into the Seven Psalms. I was using them as overtones to the acoustic guitar, so I would pick out certain guitar notes, and add a certain spinning bell to it, but very subtle - it was just to make the track feel deeper and maybe dream-like. We had an afternoon in a church, in Houston, and began to look for places that VOCES8 could sing, and there was one spot particularly where I was looking for a minor-second sound in a chord, and I wanted to see if they could do it - which of course they could effortlessly. It sounded great. I tried having them sing words but that felt like an anomaly - trained voices have a different way of singing popular music. So I found I needed to have them singing oohs and aahs and closed chords, and quite often I would also take individual voices, mostly the sopranos, and add them to the end of a guitar note. What it does to the guitar string is quite magical. You can’t hear it as a voice - it just sounds like an extended ring. Last summer I played a set at the Newport Folk Festival and I said you can donate my money to VOCES8’s teaching programmes, which I support enthusiastically. Aside from their incredible musicality, they’re very generous and very dedicated to teaching.

Recognition and Legacy

Simon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. During his distinguished career, Simon has been the recipient of many honors including 12 Grammy Awards, three of which - "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "Still Crazy After All These Years and Graceland - were Album of the Year. In 2003, he was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for his work as half of the duo Simon and Garfunkel. He is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, a recipient of the Hall of Fame's Johnny Mercer Award and was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Simon and Garfunkel and as a solo artist. His song "Mrs. has added his name to two of their “100 Greatest of All Time” lists - as a guitarist (2011) and a songwriter (2015). In 2007, he was the first recipient of the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

Paul Simon is one of the greatest American song writers of all time. For 66 year we have been able to enjoy not so much the sound of silence, but the sound of Paul Simon, one of the best songwriters who ever lived, who has created some of the most enduring songs of all time, and albums that changed music forever.

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