★★★★★ Soundtrack of my life

Lyrics 1964-2011

Paul Simon

A thing I will never get used to: most people listen to popular songs, and they don't hear the words. Over and over I have had the experience of listening to a song with someone, making a remark on the lyrics, and discovering that the someone, who literally JUST HEARD THEM, is unaware of them. Over and over I have had people tell me, "I don't like poetry." The following conversation often ensues,

Do you like rock songs?
Yes!
Then you like poetry!
That's different.

And it is different, because they don't hear the words as words that mean something -- they are just sounds like the drums and guitars. They listen to Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road without hearing the poetry. It's not a thing I can do.

Paul Simon is, in my opinion, the best poet among popular singer/songwriters. This, of course, is not an objective opinion. Simon has been there making sounds in the background of my whole life. He burst into my consciousness in a big way in 1970 with the release of Bridge Over Troubled Water (which, despite its popularity, is not in my opinion, one of his better poems), and I then found that I had been hearing Simon and Garfunkel on the radio for most of my life. (In the 1960s and 1970s the radio was where the music was.) I only gradually became aware of some of his earlier poetry, for instance the artfully clumsy "Kathy's Song"

And a song I was writing is left undone
I don't know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can't believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme

I still remember parts of my life by the Paul Simon songs that were playing at the time. For instance, two songs I never much liked, "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" and "Mother and Child Reunion," although released in 1972, were still getting radio play when I was a postdoc at MIT from 1984-1987.

The next big burst was the albums Graceland in 1986 and The Rhythm of the Saints in 1990 (in collaboration with African and Latin American artists, respectively). They were popular, and The Rhythm of the Saints contains some of Simon's best poetry, for instance, "The Cool, Cool River"

Anger and no one can heal it
Slides through the metal detector
Lives like a mole in a motel
A slide in a slide projector
The cool, cool river
Sweeps the wild, white ocean
The rage, the rage of love turns inward
To become prayers of devotion

I am a self-satisfied person, but when I listened to The Rhythm of the Saints in my car driving through the fall foliage in New Hampshire, I caught myself thinking, "I would give a lot to write like that."

Poets always recommend that you read their poetry aloud. For this book, I went one better. With rare exceptions the poems in Lyrics 1964-2011 were recorded as songs, and I listened to them as I made my way through it.

Lyrics 1964-2011 on Amazon

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