Paul Simon

During his distinguished career Paul Simon has been the recipient of many honors and awards including 12 Grammy Awards, three of which (��Bridge Over Troubled Water��, ��Still Crazy After All These Years�� and ��Graceland��) were albums 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 an inductee of The Songwriters Hall of Fame and is in the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame both as a member of Simon and Garfunkel and as a solo artist. His song ��Mrs. Robinson�� from the motion picture ��The Graduate�� was named in the top ten of The American Film Institute's 100 Years 100 Songs. He was a recipient of The Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and was named as one of Time Magazine's ��100 People Who Shape Our World�� in 2006.

Of Simon's many concert appearances he is most fond of the two concerts in Central Park in New York (with his partner and childhood friend Art Garfunkel in 1981 and as a solo artist in 1991) and the series of shows he did at the invitation of Nelson Mandela in South Africa: the first American artist to perform in post-apartheid South Africa.

Paul Simon's philanthropic work includes the co-founding of The Children's Health Fund with Dr. Irwin Redlener. The CHF donates and staffs mobile medical vans that bring health care to poor and indigent children in urban and rural locations around the United States. In the twenty years since its inception it has provided over 1,200,000 doctor /patient visits. In the wake of Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina it was the primary health care source for those communities decimated by the storms. Mr. Simon has also raised millions of dollars for worthy causes as varied as AMFAR, The Nature Conservancy, The Fund for Imprisoned Children In South Africa and Autism Speaks. In 1989 The United Negro College Fund honored him with its Frederick D. Patterson Award.

On May 23rd, 2007, Simon was the recipient of the first annual Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Named in honor of the legendary George and Ira Gershwin, this newly created award recognizes the profound and positive effect of popular music on the world��s culture, and will be given annually to a composer or performer whose lifetime contributions exemplify the standard of excellence associated with the Gershwins.

Early Career

In early 1964, Simon and Garfunkel got an audition with Columbia Records, whose executives were impressed enough to sign the duo to a contract to produce an album. According to a February 2001 writing from Bud Scoppa, Miles Davis was a member of the Columbia Records staff that offered the duo a record deal.[citation needed] Columbia decided that the two would be called simply ��Simon & Garfunkel,�� which Simon claimed in 2003, was the first time that artists' ethnic names had been used in pop music.

Simon and Garfunkel's first LP, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. was released on October 19, 1964 and comprised twelve songs in the folk vein, five of them written by Simon. The album initially flopped, but East Coast radio stations began receiving requests for one of the tracks, Simon's ��The Sound of Silence.�� Their producer, Tom Wilson, overdubbed the track with electric guitar, bass, and drums, releasing it as a single that eventually went to number one on the pop charts in the USA.

Simon had gone to England after the initial failure of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., pursuing a solo career (including collaborations with Bruce Woodley of The Seekers) and releasing the album The Paul Simon Song Book in the UK in 1965. But he returned to the USA to reunite with Garfunkel after ��The Sound of Silence�� had started to enjoy commercial success.

Together they recorded four influential albums, Sounds of Silence, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Bookends and Bridge over Troubled Water.

Simon and Garfunkel also contributed extensively to the soundtrack of the 1967 Mike Nichols film The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. While writing ��Mrs. Robinson,�� Simon originally toyed with the title ��Mrs. Roosevelt.�� When Garfunkel reported this indecision over the song's name to the director, Nichols replied, ��Don't be ridiculous! We're making a movie here! It's Mrs. Robinson!��

Simon pursued solo projects after the duo released their very popular album Bridge over Troubled Water. Occasionally, he and Garfunkel did reunite, such as in 1975 for their Top Ten single ��My Little Town,�� which Simon originally wrote for Garfunkel, claiming Garfunkel's solo output was lacking ��bite.�� The song was included on their respective solo albums; Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years, and Garfunkel's Breakaway.

In 1981, they got together again for the famous concert in Central Park, followed by a world tour and an aborted reunion album Think Too Much, which was eventually released, sans Garfunkel, as Hearts and Bones. Together, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

In 2003, the two reunited again when they received Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. This reunion led to a U.S. tour, the acclaimed ��Old Friends�� concert series, followed by a 2004 international encore, which culminated in a free concert at the Colosseum in Rome. That final concert drew 600,000 people ?�� 100,000 more than had attended Paul McCartney's concert at the same venue a year earlier.

Solo career

After Simon and Garfunkel split in 1970, Simon began to write and record solo material. He released Paul Simon in 1972, which contained one of his first experiments with world music, the Jamaican-inspired ��Mother and Child Reunion��, and There Goes Rhymin' Simon in 1973, which featured such popular hit songs as ��Something So Right�� (a tribute to his first wife, Peggy), ��Kodachrome��, ��American Tune��, and ��Loves Me Like a Rock��, the latter two obliquely referencing the dark cloud of the Watergate scandal involving the Nixon administration.

His 1975 album Still Crazy After All These Years is considered to be among his finest work, particularly the title track and the hit single ��50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.��

Over the next five years, Simon dabbled in various projects, including writing music for the film Shampoo, a project which was eventually scrapped and was cast as Tony Lacey in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall.

He continued, though less prolifically, to produce hits such as ��Slip Slidin' Away�� and ��Late in the Evening,�� while often appearing on Saturday Night Live. The One Trick Pony album, Simon's first album with Warner Bros. Records was also paired with a major motion picture of the same name, with Simon in the starring role.

Simon's next album Hearts and Bones, while critically acclaimed, did not yield any hit singles and marked a lull in his commercial popularity in the early 1980s. The album featured ��The Late Great Johnny Ace��, a song partly about Johnny Ace, a U.S rhythm and blues singer, and partly about slain ex- Beatle John Lennon.

In 1985, Simon lent his talents to USA for Africa and performed on the famine relief fundraising single ��We Are the World��. In 1986 he released the immensely popular Graceland, for which he won a Grammy. The album featured the groundbreaking use of African rhythms and performers such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

In 1990, he followed up Graceland with the commercially successful and consistent successor album The Rhythm of the Saints, which featured Brazilian musical themes. These albums helped to popularize world music as a genre. The importance of both albums allowed Simon to stage another New York concert, and on August 15, 1991, almost 10 years after his concert with Garfunkel, Simon staged another concert in Central Park with both African and South American bands. The success led to both a live album and an Emmy winning TV special.

His 2000 studio album You're the One, did not reach the commercial heights of previous albums but was considered by many fans and critics to be an artistic success and received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. A DVD of the same title, taped in Paris, was released in 2000. In 2002 he recorded the theme song for the animated children's movie The Wild Thornberrys Movie called Father and Daughter. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song.

Simon is also one of the practitioners of a creative and distinctive fingerstyle guitar style in popular music. His instrumental proficiency (influenced by British guitarist Davey Graham as evidenced by his cover of Graham��s very difficult Anji from Sounds of Silence) has always been highly underrated and practically invisible as a guitarist. His Cole Porter-esque compositional abilities with his combination of jazz-tinged chords and seamless, romantic, poetic lyrics ranged throughout all his different songwriting styles.
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Paul Simon at Flushing Meadows Corona Park

by Mike Perciaccante
October 13, 2018

Paul Simon Flushing Meadows Corona Park Homeward Bound: The Farewell Performance Flushing, NY September 22, 2018 “Hello, my friends!"--so began Paul Simon's farewell concert, held in the New York City borough where it all began. The location, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, was the site of two World's Fairs (1939 and 1964), and is, according to Simon, a twenty-minute bicycle ride from where he grew up. The two-and-a-half-hour, career-spanning concert represented a perfect ...

Album Review

Paul Simon: In The Blue Light

Read "In The Blue Light" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
September 23, 2018

To this very day, as he readies the last shows of his Homeward Bound tour, Paul Simon's new is as new as his old once was. When your most maligned works, 1980's One Trick Pony (Warner Brothers), 84's dark epic Heart and Bones (Warner Brothers), and 97's errant Songs From The Capeman (Warner Brothers, 1997) yields such lasting beauty as “Late in The Evening," “Hearts and Bones," “The Late, Great Johnny Ace," “The Vampires," and “Adious Hermanos," a severe re-assessment ...

Album Review

Paul Simon: In The Blue Light

Read "In The Blue Light" reviewed by Nenad Georgievski

by Nenad Georgievski
September 5, 2018

It's not unusual for artists to re-record a song or two from their past oeuvre. Actually, the history of music is replete with artists revisiting their past achievements. This goes all the way to the era of crooners, and one can see singers like Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett offering different takes on same songs in different settings at different times. Even though this is a new era, the process of revisiting and re-creating past songs and even entire albums ...

Extended Analysis

Paul Simon: The Complete Albums Collection

by John Kelman
January 11, 2014

If the history books were to be closed on singer/songwriter Paul Simon's career today, he'd have already left a legacy more than sufficient to ensure a substantial chapter. While other emergent songwriters of his day--Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman amongst them--have clearly evolved over the years, there's been an underlying approach that's remained consistent across, in many cases, half a century. That's not to dismiss or denigrate these icons of song, only to say that Simon has emerged ...

135

Album Review

Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What

Read "So Beautiful or So What" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
April 28, 2011

After successful run at self-producing, yielding hits like Graceland (Warner Bros., 1986) and The Rhythm of the Saints (Warner Bros., 1990), Paul Simon reunites with Phil Ramone for So Beautiful or So What, the singer/songwriter's first album since the largely overlooked Surprise (Warner Bros., 2006). Ramone last worked with the singer/songwriter on One Trick Pony (Warner Bros., 1980), but was responsible for producing many of Simon's early hits from the 1970s. After breaking out with the iconic ...

204

Album Review

Simon & Garfunkel: Live 1969

Read "Live 1969" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
August 12, 2008

Recorded during performances in October and November '69 for what was supposed to be the live album follow-up to Bridge Over Troubled Water (which the duo had recorded before these concerts but was not yet released on Columbia), Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel capture on Live 1969 the mood of their generation changing. That live album never came out (until now) because during those dates their mystic musical communion was disintegrating, although you'd never know that from its joyful sound.

184

Album Review

Paul Simon: Surprise

by John Kelman
May 28, 2006

Paul Simon has been exploring and adapting his songwriting to the music of other cultures since the mid- 1980s, but strip away the arrangements from this material and you still have Paul Simon the singer/songwriter. The same can be said about Surprise. Instead of the world music stylings of Graceland (Warner Bros., 1986) or You're the One (Warner Bros., 2000), Simon radically shifts gears here. Collaborating with veteran producer/sonic landscaper Brian Eno, he has produced an entirely contemporary album that ...

Recording

Paul Simon To Release New Album �C In The Blue Light �C On September 7 Coinciding With Final Leg Of Homeward Bound �C The Farewell Tour

Paul Simon To Release New Album – In The Blue Light – On September 7 Coinciding With Final Leg Of Homeward Bound – The Farewell Tour

Source: All About Jazz
July 17, 2018

��This album consists of songs that I thought were almost right, or were odd enough to be overlooked the first time around. Re-doing arrangements, harmonic structures, and lyrics that didn��t make their meaning clear, gave me time to clarify in my own head what I wanted to say, or realize what I was thinking and make it more easily understood.��Paul Simon, July 2018 Legendary songwriter, recording artist and performer Paul Simon will release his 14th studio album��In The Blue Light��on ...
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Recording

Paul Simon's "Graceland" 25th Anniversary Editions to be Released June 5th

Source: Sony Music Entertainment/Legacy
March 29, 2012

25th ANNIVERSARY OF PAUL SIMON'S GRACELAND CELEBRATED WITH THEATRICAL SCREENINGS AND PRIMETIME TELEVISION SPECIAL OF “UNDER AFRICAN SKIES" DOCUMENTARY; RELEASE OF 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITIONS: CD/DVD, BOX SET, VINYL AND BLU-RAY DISC “Under African Skies," New Documentary About Graceland From Two-Time Emmy, Peabody Award Winner And Oscar Nominated Filmmaker Joe Berlinger A Premiere Television Event on A&E Following Limited Theatrical Run Graceland 25th Anniversary Editions on Legacy Recordings To Be Released June 5th The 25th anniversary of Graceland, Paul Simon's groundbreaking ...
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TV / Film

New Documentary Explores the Making of Paul Simon's Graceland, 25 Years Later

Source: Something Else!
January 18, 2012

"Under African Skies," a new documentary from Joe Berlinger on the making of Paul Simon's Graceland, will debut on Jan. 22 at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The premiere kicks off a year-long celebration of the groundbreaking album's 25th anniversary. That includes a commemorative edition deluxe collector's box set as well as a special two-disc set from Legacy Recordings this spring, each featuring the original album with bonus tracks and the director's cut of “Under African Skies." Graceland eventually sold ...
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Recording

Paul Simon: Songwriter 2-Disc Collection out 10/24

Source: JamBase
September 28, 2011

2 DISC SET ILLUMINATES SIMON'S EVOLUTION FROM 1960S TO PRESENT Songwriter is a selection of songs, chosen by the composer, as the best of his decades-long creative output. Some of these are well-known hits and others more obscure works, but all bear the distinct lyrical, melodic and rhythmic signature of Paul Simon, one of the great composers of popular song in the last 50 years. As Simon has said, “I think of myself as a songwriter first, the recording artist ...
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Performance / Tour

Paul Simon: Fall U.S. Tour

Source: JamBase
September 11, 2011

MORE DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON Paul Simon has announced the first part of his Fall US Tour. The tour starts October 17 in Phoenix and includes stops in Berkeley, San Diego, Las Vegas, Broomfield, New Orleans, and more. Tickets to the general public will go on sale first for the shows in Phoenix (on sale September 12) and Berkeley (on sale September 11). Click here for more information. Paul Simon Tour Dates

10/17/11 Mon Comerica Theatre Phoenix, AZ 10/19/11 ...
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130

Recording

Paul Simon - So Beautiful or so What (2011)

Source: Something Else!
April 12, 2011

By Nick DeRiso Paul Simon's new record, his first since 2006's dense Brian Eno-collaboration Surprise, is a career-spanning, sometimes duskily ruminative, quirk-splashed triumph—simultaneously bold in its constructions and timeless in its themes. There's a freedom, perhaps, that comes from going it alone: After 30 years with Warner Bros., Simon paid for the lengthy sessions that eventually produced So Beautiful or So What, then signed with the Concord Music Group. The album is due out on Tuesday; a sold-out tour of ...
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124

Performance / Tour

Paul Simon Adds Club Dates

Source: JamBase
March 29, 2011

HOW THE AUDIENCE APPROACHES WHAT IT YEARNS Paul Simon has added club dates in select cities to his recently announced, largely sold-out spring theater tour. The added shows offer fans a chance to see the iconic artist and his stellar band in more intimate, personal settings. “I'm going to play 3,000 seat theaters and also clubs," Simon told Rolling Stone. “I want to play several songs from the new album and music from my repertoire that I either haven't played ...
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132

Recording

Paul Simon - The Essential Paul Simon (2007)

Source: Something Else!
March 27, 2011

By Mark Saleski Paul Simon's career has something that is becoming quite rare in the entertainment world: longevity. Yes, the songs on this collection span over three decades. During that time period our culture, the music biz, and Simon himself have seen great changes. So has every one of us. For instance, at the beginning of this thirty year period, I could not have been called a Paul Simon fan. I had no use for Simon and Garfunkel and considered ...
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Performance / Tour

Paul Simon: U.S. Tour

Source: JamBase
March 5, 2011

TOUR STARTS APRIL 15 IN SEATTLE, WA; JIMMY FALLON PERFORMANCES APRIL 6- 7 To celebrate the release of his first new record in five years, legendary artist Paul Simon has announced a very special North American tour beginning Friday, April 15 in Seattle, Washington. Included in the set will be songs from So Beautiful or So What, his brand new album set for release by Hear Music/Concord Music Group on Tuesday, April 12, 2011. Before hitting the road, Simon will ...
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115

Recording

Listen up Preview: Paul Simon, "The Afterlife" (2011)

Source: Something Else!
February 27, 2011

By Nick DeRiso “The Afterlife," featured on Paul Simon's forthcoming album So Beautiful or So What, is pulsing and sinewy—almost like a lost track from Graceland. Not that there's anything wrong with that. See, Simon has said the premise of this new recording was to get away from the rhythmic focus he'd had since that late 1980s smash, to focus more on singer-songwriterly guitar-based tracks. And he certainly did that on the advance cut “Getting Ready for Christmas Day," a ...
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