The same qualities that made Simon seem square as a younger artist made him durable into—and beyond—middle age. His second solo album, Paul Simon, invented the literate, introverted style we now call indie-folk, and beat Oscar the Grouch by two years in suggesting that melancholy isn’t a weakness, but a form of insulation against even worse emotional weather. In the ’80s, when Bob Dylan was making kabuki disco albums and Simon’s other ’60s peers—the Rolling Stones, for example—were getting lost in the open ocean of too much encouragement, Simon recorded Graceland, an album whose South African sound was both middlebrow and radical, universally likable and yet alien to Simon's typical audience. (For further listening on this subject, visit the compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, released just around the time Graceland came out. It endures.)
Simon’s lyrics, which had always been less about people being free than people getting by, were maturing: He was more aloof now, but funnier, too. Take this, the first verse of a song called “Gumboots”:
"I was having this discussion in a taxi heading downtown/Rearranging my position on this friend of mine who had a little bit of a breakdown/I said, ‘Hey, you know, breakdowns come and breakdowns go/ So what are you going to do about it? That’s what I’d like to know.’”
Twenty years earlier, he would’ve zeroed in on the breakdown and thrown an orchestra at it; now it was relegated to a couple lines on an album with a host of other problems to compartmentalize. Here was someone stepping into the tempered disappointments of being 40 like they were shoes bought just a little too soon. This, he recently told a class at Yale, is when Simon says he was finally comfortable admitting he was an artist.
Simon’s post-Graceland career has had its embarrassments, but as with a lot of older, canonized artists, critics seem to take an unusual kind of glee in magnifying them, when, near as I can tell, he bothers the public far less than the rest of his graduating class. There was The Capeman, a musical about the Puerto Rican gang member Salvador Agron, which is one of those sub-middling projects nobody would’ve heard about if it wasn’t coming to us from Paul Simon, but since it was coming to us from Paul Simon, people heard about it a lot more than they needed to. (Several writers—myself included, I admit—have noted how unconvincing Simon is when using the word “fuck,” which he attempts several times on the soundtrack.) There was 2006’s Surprise, which found him working with Brian Eno, an artist of related but incompatible genius whose deference to atmosphere tended to wash out the quiet precision of Simon’s songs.
So Beautiful or So What from 2011 was a lot better, and, for an artist of Simon’s stature, surprisingly weird—the sound of an elder statesman settling into his own idiosyncrasies, seemingly unconcerned with legacy or relevance. More than anything, Simon in the ’00s reminds me of the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, himself a national treasure whose albums have only gotten leaner and more enigmatic as he keeps making them.
Which brings us to Stranger to Stranger, a compact, often jittery album populated by schizophrenics, disenfranchised teenagers, musicians locked out of their own gigs, and some kind of avenging werewolf coming to kill the rich. I’ve always attributed part of Simon’s enormous popularity to how good he is at teasing out life’s silver linings, at softening disappointment with bittersweetness, regret with nostalgia. Even his saddest songs contain the implicit bromide that life goes on.
Here, things feel less reassuring, more open-ended. Several of the album’s songs—“Street Angel,” “In a Parade,” “The Werewolf”—are bemused and overstuffed, rickshaw rides down busy, unfamiliar streets with people you can’t quite get a read on. Even the album’s friendliest moment, a light, West African-style folksong called “Cool Papa Bell,” is shadowed by lines about “the thrill you feel when evil dreams come true.” (It also contains Simon’s most convincing use of the word “fuck” yet.) Here, Simon’s voice—always boyish, always a little bit distracted—takes on the ominous warmth of Albert Brooks in Drive, who isn’t slitting your wrist until he is.
The shift here is from wisdom to prophecy, from certainty to contingency. Musically, it’s his most adventurous album since Graceland, filed with strange rhythmic kinks and a junkyard’s worth of barely identifiable sounds. Simon’s appropriation of new styles has often had the unfortunate effect of making it seem like he’s domesticating them, making them palatable for the king’s court. (This was, of course, a big debate around Graceland.) Here, he gets as close as he’s ever been to the romantic ideal of kids gathered on a corner banging on what they found in the alley, or of the weird old guy bumping down the road in a wooden cart filled with treasures unknown, from the chimes of “The Clock” and the accidental ambience of “In the Garden of Edie” to the vocal sample on “Street Angel,” flipped and processed to make it sound like a clogged drain. (The sample comes from the Golden Gate Quartet, a proto-gospel group who Simon also sampled on So Beautiful or So What, and who invented what in my estimation is the safest anti-depressant on the market.)
Simon has claimed inspiration in part from the American composer Harry Partch, who envisioned a scale that broke up the customary 12 tones into 43, creating slippages and interstices and little gradations of sound that might seem like dissonance to Western ears but that have an oblique, mysterious beauty. Simon borrows a couple of Partch’s homemade instruments here—the zoomoozophone, the chromelodeon—but also borrows a little of his spirit, of a transient life, of quick fixes and no clear plan. My favorite lyrics sound thrillingly unwritten, raw footage of wit in action. Consider it a corrective to a career of smoothing things over: Stranger to Stranger is unpasteurized, mongrel music.
Simon has always been subject to criticism for a certain kind of exceptionalism. Two of his biggest songs, “I Am a Rock” and “Sounds of Silence,” deal with characters who wear their alienation like badges, dark lords of their own personal libraries left with no choice but to turn their faces heroically away from the sheeple who surround them. This was a guy who responded to the news of his partner going to work on a movie in Mexico by writing a song called “The Only Living Boy in New York,” never mind the other 6 million people living there.
As his career wore on, the alienation mellowed into casual arrogance. By 1983’s Hearts and Bones, which Simon himself has acknowledged as an artistic dead-end, he had become the kind of guy who shows up at the party but never has a good time, bored by life but willing to smirk at it, who thinks he’s better than you but is too polite to say so.
We see some of that guy on Stranger, just as we see him on every Paul Simon album—that’s part of what makes it a Paul Simon album. The musician on “Wristband,” for example, who draws an analogy between his own frustrations getting back into the VIP area and what poor people must feel on the brink of a riot. Personally, I see it as satire, the portrait of someone who has mostly lost touch with reality but still has to answer to it eventually. My guess is many will see it as condescension.
Then again, pop has always been nicer to artists who portray struggle than relative ease, more welcoming of emotional engagement than emotional detachment, and increasingly hostile both to intelligence and ambiguity. Simon is all these supposedly bad things and worse. For every one of him, there are 10 guys waiting to stuff him into a locker—that’s how it is, and probably how it’ll always be. “It turns out to be a great thing for me, I don’t worry/I don’t think,” he sings at the beginning of “Cool Papa Bell.” “Because it’s not my job to worry or to think. Not me. I’m more like—every day I’m here I’m grateful.” Anyone familiar with Simon's music knows he must be talking about someone else; his genius is being able to sell the line anyway.
