I'm sorry but Paul Simon is so overrated

paul simon is totally corny, i will admit, but i am, too, so

I remember the Capeman got some really harsh reviews. He went through three directors, and basically the response was that he seemed very naive about how Broadway shows worked....

his score was praised though (I remember hearing and liking "Bernadette")

xxxpost

richard cory is p early in simon's career & seems odd to hold against him
ps as a kid i liked that song for its traditional-ness i guess but i was raised on burl ives so

yeah this was basically the comparison i was tryna make (sorry max) cuz like '50 ways to leave your lover' is a total jam, catchy and funny and fun to listen to in a way cohen could never manage but when hes listing off the different ways so many of them are kinda nonsensical or awkward in order to fit the rhyme scheme ('get a new plan, stan'?) that it doesnt distract from the song but its still p corny

― Lamp, Sunday, August 7, 2011 5:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this feels almost too obviously corny to be 'corny' to me
if that makes sense

I had a longer post but I should own up that I relate more strongly to Cohen in part because melody is difficult for me, if it wasn't for mrs. aero being pretty ruthless about saying "melodically you're being boring there" I would get a lot more writing done & lots of it would sound exactly the same - whereas Simon specializes in breezy wasn't-this-always-just-sitting-right-there? melodies, enviably effortless feel

richard cory is p early in simon's career & seems odd to hold against him

this is what i meant when i said i didn't like simon & garfunkel lyrics. i guess it's true that he's obsessed with himself and his experiences but it doesn't hurt the later songwriting afaic.

Stealing song from Los Lobos: Dud

We only have dumb inarticulate Lobos guy's word for it!

I wish we wouldn't spend as much time discussing Simon's lyrics as we do about what interesting chordal patterns this guy picks on his guitar.

richard cory is p early in simon's career & seems odd to hold against him

fair point, though "I am a rock" is from the same phase

i am too dumb about that stuff :(

xp

I wish we wouldn't spend as much time discussing Simon's lyrics as we do about what interesting chordal patterns this guy picks on his guitar.

oh hush you, either say yourself what those chordal patterns are or cease yr whinin

I tend to pretend the S&G stuff doesn't exist to be honest.

yes he had flashes of brilliance during the garfunkel era but a lot of stuff was just embarrassing. and then paul simon is just so !!!

yes he had flashes of brilliance during the garfunkel era but a lot of stuff was just embarrassing. and then paul simon is just so !!!

makes you wonder who he ripped off amirite lol

JUST A JOKE EVERYBODY BE CALM.

okay listening to this jerry landis song on youtube and lolling at how in character it is for lamp to like this

ok lol @ this too btw iirc

haha i'll kill you >:[

xp

Capeman - that was it!!

Man I was so pissed that night.

i was raised on burl ives so

don't hate on burl btw, burl ives is real

i think spirit voices is a really good example of a lot of things i think about simon. like how musically its this shuffly samba but obviously he never sings like he's singing samba, he's just as happy here to preserve the exotic otherness of that style. so yeah at first it seems like this really horrible example of that imperialism 102 but then the singer singing portugese appears and he's like bathed in this metallic reverb and its a fucking apparition, and you realise that it works as this encapsulation of like mystical tourism or something. like its really beautiful and i love how the song *stages* the event instead of describing it ("all of these spirit voices rule the night") but it also seems to work as a sly wink to the listener about whats really going on when he plays with these other musics. idk i might be reading to much into it. but it does seem to integrate how fantastic simon is at integrating his songwriting with his sonic formalism.

oh im not at all -- just thinking that richard cory's straightforward storytelling style prob appealed to me at the time for that reason xp

One and one-half wandering jews
Free to wander wherever they choose
Are travelling together
In the sangre de cristo
The blood of christ mountains
Of new mexico
On the last leg of the journey
They started a long time ago
The arc of a love affair
Rainbows in the high desert air

otm

my favourite line in that song is "the bride was contagious/ she burned like a bride"

she burned like a bride

it's sad...

even Carrie Fisher must have soul

fwiw aretha tore brooklyn apart with a paul simon song the other night...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIjeUIeSKgg

I love when Aretha sits down at the piano.

If I were Rick Rubin I'd beg Aretha to record a piano and vocal album.

Can someone please explain to me where the artistry is in One Trick Pony

I have to say, from the original post, Simon at his power-in-the-formula best is on display in "Late in the Evening" - who the fuck else could pull of "smoke myself a J" there? not Leonard Cohen, to be fair!

pull off

can't even fuckin type for shit any more, it sucks

whereas Simon specializes in breezy wasn't-this-always-just-sitting-right-there? melodies, enviably effortless feel

this is kinda what i was driving at i guess

how do i shot artistry

This was Simon's response to that Los Lobos interview:

This Los Lobos thing has come up before, so I wanted to talk to you direct. They said all this stuff to Songtalk magazine in the States, and I’ve replied to it all in an interview that hasn’t run yet, but its all there. There was a bad atmosphere at those sessions (with Los Lobos on Graceland) from the start; I don’t know what it is with them. The whole deal for them working on Graceland was all worked out beforehand between Los Lobos and Lenny Warnoker (Managing Director at Warners USA) and there were no complaints at the time. It was made clear from the outset that we didn’t have a song. There was no song. It was being written from scratch. I was – and still am – a fan of the band. What I really love is the accordion sound. So we started jamming in the rehearsal room and nothing was really coming together, and so I said do you have any ideas we can work on. What I wanted for the Graceland track was like a generic Los Lobos dikka-de-dikka guitar sound. And so we came up with something around a riff. They never once said that this guitar line is one of ours and we don’t want you to have it. So we worked on recording this track for about three days, which is a long time to work on one track. I had to teach David Hildegger how to sing this song! And then David Hildegger came up to me and said “we’re not happy with this track. We wanna do a ballad”. But I couldn’t have that. At that time it was the last track of the whole album – eventually we did one more – and I just said at this stage I don’t care whether the album comes out without Los Lobos on it. I was getting really tired of it – I don’t want to get into a public slanging match over this, but this thing keeps coming up.

“So we finished the recordings. And three months passed, and there was no mention of “joint writing”. The album came out and we heard nothing. Then six months passed and Graceland had become a hit and the first thing I heard about the problem was when my manager got a lawyer’s letter. I was shocked. They sent this thing to my manager, not me. If there was a problem they could have contacted me direct, they’ve got my home number, we talked a lot. If you ask me it was a lawyer’s idea. You know, “the records a hit, and there’s $100,000 in it”. They had nine months from the recordings to talk to me about all this, but I heard nothing. And its still not sorted out because they still keep bringing it up – I heard they’d done this interview for you. I don’t want to get into a public slanging match with them, because I really like their music.”

i always hate it when ppl have to bag on someone who is awesome do defend someone else who is awesome.

as said by others, never really occured to me to compare cohen and simon tbh

i mean simon's strength isnt in the words-qua-words, though he's obviously got a gift for them, its the performance; i mean if you put leonard cohens words written down next to paul simons words written down cohen probably comes across as the stronger poet. but the difference between a song like story of isaac and a song like graceland--to me--is that cohen is, like, singing a poem over some guitar--if i'm being charitable i can say that at least he's making an attempt to create an engagement between the content & sound of the lyrics and the action of the music--but in "graceland" all these things exist together, playing off one another, changing the force and meaning of each component. and yet it comes across as totally seamless, as though it's off the top of simon's head.

i actually think you sort of secretly acknowledge this when you talk about the things that simon is good at. i dont know, i guess i am not really doing a "whole career" thing here, though lets not forget that simon was in his 20s throughout the S&G years and cohen didnt move to NYC till he was in his 30s. also its like "hi leonard could you write about something besides god for, like, once. no, besides sex too."

Simon and Byrne would be the more obvious comparison

i think only insulting thing anyone said about leonard cohen on this thread is when i called him "boring old leonard cohen." which i didnt even mean!

you called him stupid

The way Simon and Los Lobos remember the events is close enough that I still side with Simon if forced to pick one.

i am just surprised that everyone took me so seriously. i guess this is the first ILM thread i have engaged with in a while. sorry guys, leonard cohen rules.

i didn't take you srsly, srsly

David Hildegger

max to me this is just fun is all! I was weirded out when you were like comin politics-thread style, the dialectic fire of music discussion is a blast to me, I want more ppl comin all PAUL SIMON OWNS style that is fun imo and is an opportunity to really explore my thoughts about both more. anyway what I was gonna say:

i actually think you sort of secretly acknowledge this when you talk about the things that simon is good at.

no secret at all! you said initially

also simon is a better lyricist than stupid ol leonard cohen

which you then amended w/ there are very few people who can write words to music (and perform them) better than paul simon can which is true, but Simon's stuff ventures into it-works-best-if-you-hear-it territory - which - I lean both ways tbh, sometimes I think that's where the real deal is, where it's only truly great if it only works in that one moment when the words are at play in the air...because that's the original nature of the art, heard-not-read, for people who listen not people who're reading...and then other times I'm like, no that's bullshit, truly great lyricists work on paper and in-vivo and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference, you can rip it free from its context and it's still tuff as fuck. And while Simon seems to understand song formalism better, there's no question that metrically Cohen runs him ragged - Cohen's actual-poetry gift is just like whoa, his "numbers" in the old sense are just godlike

haha i wrote the bit about writing words to music to make it clear that by "lyricist" i meant something different than "word arranger"

yeah i think max yr right tho,

i see cohen as a poet first, whereas simon is master of american pop songwriting and fundamentally to me a MUSICIAN...cohen is essentially a non-musician who, by way of having such an incredibly amazing sense of aesthetics (and a simple, but really canny way with melody) was able to put himself in situations where his words and the musical setting came together to form something really special..and really singular IMO...

but i mean if you're talking like who is the most talented musically, there's no question...simon can write so much broader in terms of idiom and obv whether it was folk or orchestral pop or ersatz african or 70s FM rock or whatever it was, he knows how to mix with it and is good enough a musician and songwriter and performer to to it.

then other times I'm like, no that's bullshit, truly great lyricists work on paper and in-vivo and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference, you can rip it free from its context and it's still tuff as fuck.

That's the thing: I have no interest in ripping lyrics free from their original context.

David Hildegger

that said, i think simon was at his best when he had a great collaborative partner like art garfunkel or chevy chase