POLL paul simon - the rhythm of the saints

"It got me thinking when that first popped out," Paul Simon says, sitting in the living room of his Manhattan duplex, watching an early moon come up over Central Park. " 'The cross is in the ball park.' "The first thing I thought of was Billy Graham, or the Pope, or evangelical gatherings. But I came to feel what that's really about is the cross that we bear. The burdens that we carry are doable, they're in the ballpark." -Paul Simon

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,971667,00.html#ixzz1OLgp7kSo

barf

So this is happening...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2GN3wdfqbA

I say why why why why
I say why

was like a pencil point
a love bite

Then I fall to my knees
I grow weak, I go slack
As if she captured the breath of my
voice in a bottle
And I can't catch it back

But I feel good
It's a fine day
The way the sun hits off the runway
A cloud shifts
The plane lifts
She moves on

it doesnt even bother me that he says "the rose of jericho"

I always heard it as more literal than that, and one of my favorite couplets.

A family of musicians took shelter for the night in the little harbor church of St. Cecilia
Two guitars, bata, bass drum and tambourine, rows of Jericho and Bougainvillea

But I was wrong: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/509803/rose-of-Jericho

i believe in the future
i may live in car
my radio tuned to the voice of a star
song dogs barking at the break of dawn
lightning pushes the edge of a thunderstorm
these old hopes and fears still at my side

ba ba ba ba ba ba Ba Ba Ba BA BA BA PROUST!

armies of engineers
to analyze the soil

I was thinking about something during the absurd Cohen/Simon smackdown thread, but just got round to finishing my thought.

I dug out the disc with bonus tracks to relisten and marvel again at the quality of the lyrics he throws away.

"The Coast" work-in-progress

This is the echo of the echo of the first song that lullabied /
The heartbeat of the host

"Spirit Voices" work-in-progress:

My horse and my saddle and my gracious companions /
We tripped over a mountain and we fell into a vast canyon

I mean, really. Maybe the songs as eventually released were fine, but those throwaway lyrics are as good as most people will ever write.

'Can't Run But' still sounds gorgeous. I love this album - even the lower-key stuff on the record (the title track, 'Further to Fly', 'She Moves On') got to me eventually.

Still can't believe 'Spirit Voices' and 'Born at the Right Time' didn't get votes - I'll take either of those songs over anything on Graceland at this point.

I think I missed the poll, but probably would have voted for either "Spirit Voices" or "The Coast."

Crap, or "She Moves On," or or or.

I like "Obvious Child" a lot but it's no longer my fave track on this lovely record

'The Coast' would have got my vote, definitely - Simon at his absolute best!

The gorgeous guitar lick, the wonderful vocal melody, the uplift of the chorus... it's just perfection. An all-time favourite.

I can't believe I never posted it to this thread - I know I've posted it before - but I remember reading about an alternate running order that WB made Simon change. It's even up on Wikipedia.

"The Coast"
"She Moves On"
"Proof"
"Born at the Right Time"
"The Cool, Cool River"
"The Obvious Child"
"Can't Run But"
"Spirit Voices"
"Further To Fly"
"The Rhythm of the Saints"

(also would have voted for "The Coast")

Those who are not familiar with the work-in-progress versions (bonus tracks on the rerelease) ought to give them a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkgxGpoFn8Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3-MAU7hj4

It's like those insane Townshend demos that could plausibly have been released as singles.

Yeah, that was the original track order but Warner Bros. wanted the lead single ('The Obvious Child') to open the LP... I think they were right to change the track order - the original order makes no sense to me.

spins on his crutches, says 'leave if you want if you want to leave'

xpost Fleetwood Mac has released those sorts of all but finished demos before, too. I have a hunch it's nowhere near the original demo and almost more like an alternate take with incomplete lyrics or something.

I like this live version of "Born at the Right Time" a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2rng43hdEw

The ascending guitar (poss. guitar synth, poss. Adrian Belew) line in “Cool Cool River” is my favorite thing on this record.

It's interesting, there are a million people on this and Graceland, so it's a little mysterious why they would even need Belew to blend in on guitar synth at all. I was trying to find an interview where he talked about his specific contributions. I found some neat stuff here:

https://guitarconnoisseurmagazine.com/wordpress1/2016/06/13/adrian-belew-everythihng-in-flux/

GC: Your working with Paul Simon, I’m completely ignorant of that, so could you talk about that for a minute?

AB: Through my friend Laurie Anderson, who I made three records with and one movie, she told Paul Simon that he should have me play on something with him, because she said, “He doesn’t play guitar, he makes sounds, and you might really like what he does.” So unbeknownst to me, Paul was making something called Graceland, which, once again is a seminal record, so he asked me to come into the studio in New York. I flew there and had four days there, and the first morning I arrived the engineer-producer Roy Halee put up some of the tracks and said, “Here, I’ll let you listen to this.” It was all African musicians playing, there was no…it sounded like the wrong tape, and I thought he’d made a mistake, I thought, “Well this doesn’t sound at all like Paul Simon; what is this?” And he said, “Yeah, Paul’s been doing some stuff with African musicians and you’re the first non-African to play on this.” There were no words; there was no Paul Simon on the record yet. If you can imagine what Graceland sounds like without his voice…

GC: That’s mind-boggling.

AB: It was very confusing at first. Then Paul arrived in the studio and I explained to him my concern and he was like, “Oh, of course, here let me put up this track and I don’t have all of the words but I’ll sing what I have.” So he would put up a track like You Can Call Me Al or Boy in the Bubble and he would stand right next to me, kind of quietly whisper-singing these songs to me, and it was giving me chills, of course. At the same time I instantly understood: “Oh my gosh, Paul Simon has reinvented himself and this is what it’s going to sound like;” it still gives me chills to think about it. So, we jumped in and there you go; it turned out to be a massive record, re-kickstarted his career, and once again sounded like nothing else anyone had ever done. Not many people know this but I have to tell people this: there’s a video with Chevy Chase and Paul Simon doing You Can Call Me Al and because Chevy Chase is pretending to play a saxophone, I think it misled everyone. The song, it has that part that goes, “Dah duh duhdut, dah, duh duhdut” and everybody thinks that’s a saxophone section; actually that’s my guitar synthesizer.

GC: Oh my God…

AB: (laughs) I have to say that now, I’m kinda proud of that, I was in Amsterdam not too long ago, sitting having a beer, when all of a sudden that song came on and I said to the bartender That’s me! And I never do that, but I just had to.

GC: That’s amazing.

AB: Really I’m proud of that moment, everybody knows that line, and Paul wrote the line, of course; I just played it.

Josh

I have a hunch it's nowhere near the original demo and almost more like an alternate take with incomplete lyrics or something

I think the explanation is that Simon's approach for Graceland AND RotS was to make finished instrumental tracks first, then experiment with different lyrics and vocal approaches on top of those finished instrumentals.

In one documentary he's like in a room in his house with a cathedral ceiling, bouncing a tennis ball against a high wall while brainstorming lyrics and vocals. Given that atmosphere, it is easy to imagine swapping out something like "this is the echo..." for "a family of musicians..." or whatever. It's not like he needs to call Vincent and everybody back into the studio.

^^ that was a 60 Minutes piece from 1990-91, if I remember right.

Holy fuck I'm old. Thanks A LOT, Eazy.

This is one of my all-time favourite records. I got to know it when I was 16 or 17, that was 22 years ago and it has remained in my personal top 10 ever since.
As a teenager, Further To Fly was always my favourite, but I lean more to the rest of the album these days. Now I think I'd name Cool Cool River, Can't Run But, Spirit Voices and Obvious Child as the absolute highlights. Imagine my astonishment and utter delight when exactly those four songs were performed at his farewell concert I attended recently!

It blows my mind that he was still working with Roy Halee on Graceland and The Rhythm.of the Saints - the same guy that worked on a fair bit of the Simon & Garfunkel stuff. Was The Rhythm of the Saints the last Paul Simon album he worked on?

and Simon took full production credit on those albums

Yeah, with Halee strictly credited for the engineering. I'd be very surprised if Halee hadn't been involved in the production in some way. I'm fairly certain Simon didn't do it all himself!

cooling system

a pencil point
a love bite

You know what has had me thinking about this record? Mario Brothers.

There is a part of the guitar line in "Spirit Voices" that always sounded eerily like 80s video game music to me, but I could never quite pinpoint what it was.

Then my son started playing this annoyingly repetitive Mario game and I heard it instantly. Doot-doo-doo-doo-doot-DOOT-da-dee-doo-doo. By moon, we walk, to the brujo's door. 1 UP!

When I get my shit together I will have to isolate this in a DAW so I can show y'all what I mean but seriously.

you can hear the bit I mean from 0:18 to 0:21 here, but it repeats throughout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYYQ_X3E12U

Compare with around 0:10 here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2sTvN4Tob8

What a lovely album this is.

yup

Confirmed

it's true

This is a lonely life
Sorrows everywhere you turn
And that is worth some money if you think about it
That is worth some money

surely one of his prettiest recordings? hard for me to imagine the album without that song, always feels like the centerpiece to me.

I dig it

Fans of this album; which has been your favourite since this?

So Beautiful or So What

I think Stranger to Stranger, Surprise, and So Beautiful or So What are all very respectable late career efforts.

'So Beautiful or So What' is my most favourite post-Rhythm record as well, but I love all of them - I'm even a big fan of 'Songs From The Capeman'. 'You're the One' seems rather underappreciated and was a primary target for re-recordings for 'In The Blue Light', but I'd say that many songs on that album are brilliant too.

'Rhythm of the Saints' is utterly perfect.

Valentijn otm

Love the first half of this album - track after track of total stunners. And then it mostly falls off a cliff on side 2, imo.

is 'The Cool Cool River' in the non-mostly section?

There is an evergreen debate in my head as to whether I prefer the way The Cool Cool River fades out on the album, or the bombastic horn section ending on Concert in the Park. Both so amazing.

Have always low-key loved

Maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours / I feel sure

A beautiful piece of misdirection. Following a line like "We shall suffer no more" it feels like it's gonna go into the formulation "maybe not in my lifetime, maybe not in yours, but someday" or something to that effect. But no, it's coming. In yours. He feels sure. The audacity!

God I'm looking at the Cool Cool River lyrics in full right now and it's just a masterpiece. I have deep personal connections to both Can't Run But and the Coast but it would be hard not to vote for Cool Cool River.