Phoebe
Apr-02-2008, 07:39 GMT
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Denmark
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| Hey everybody!
I´m doing a school project about Graceland for my exams in English, and I would like some background info on the song´s origin. I think there was another thread about this subject once, but I´ve been looking through every thread on this forum, and it seems like it´s been deleted.
So if any of you know something about the song Graceland´s origin, I would be VERY happy to hear from you.
Thanks in advance, Phoebe
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Peter
Apr-03-2008, 02:21 GMT
USA - United Staates America
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| Great Idea:
This is from http://www.thedreamerofmusic.com/EXPLAINS/EXPLAINS
.htm, and is the most conprehensive overviow and historical informant I´ve found:
`There´s a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline: That line came to me when I was walking past the Museum of Natural History. For no reason I can think of. It´s not related to anybody. Or anything. It just struck me as funny. Although that´s an image that people remember, they talk about that line. But really, what interested me was the next line, because I was using the word "Graceland" but it wasn´t in the chorus. I was bringing "Graceland" back into a verse. Which is one of the things I learned from African music: the recapitulation of themes can come in different placesâ?.
`I found myself writing a song called ´Graceland´, and I really was resistant to it. I didn´t want to write a song called ´Graceland´, but I couldn´t get rid of it. It just stayed with me and then I thought maybe I´m going to write a song about Graceland and I really don´t know really what I´m writing about yet. And it probably makes sense to go there and see if in fact what I´m looking for is in Graceland. I was in Lafayette, Louisiana, and I drove up to Northern Lousiana to the Mississippi Delta, and up to Mississippi, and then up to Memphis. That trip was the opening verse of the song. To me it was a father-and-son trip, and I don´t know whether I´m writing about : me and my son ? or me and my father ? It doesn´t really matter, it´s all mixed up, the same. And it´s about a reconciliation, a reconciliation with a big event in a life : losing Love. And the setting of Elvis Presley´s home is like a pilgrimage for peopleâ?.
`It is less typical of South African music than most other tracks. Largely because of the flexibility and collaborative musical gifts of two extraordinary musicians-fretless bass player Baghiti Khumalo and guitarist Ray Phiri. In fact, it almost has the feel of American country music. After the recording session, Ray told me that he´d used a relative minor chord something not often heard in South African music because he said he thought it was more like the chord changes he´d heard in my music. The addition some months later of Demola Adepoju, the pedal steel guitarist with the King Sonny Ade band of Nigeria, also contributes a musical texture that is common to both American country music and West African Musicâ?.
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Sharon
Apr-05-2008, 03:07 GMT
USA - United Staates America
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| Hi Phoebe -
I also wrote a paper on Graceland for an English class, and I found the DVD from classic albums (Paul Simon, Graceland; http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Albums-Paul-Simon-Gr
aceland/dp/B0007GADYK/ref=pd_bbs_sr_6?ie=UTF8&
s=dvd&qid=1207361153&sr=8-6) to be very, very helpful. That DVD gives a really good background of the creative process behind the production of the whole album, but also includes a really interesting and informative chapter on the title track. I think I pretty much based my whole paper on this DVD. |