Micky
Dec-04-2003, 13:21 GMT
IP:
United Kingdom
 | The guys nuts..."I have serious issues with this site, not the least of which are the images rising out of the bushes, but the news is current, and there are pictures from S&G´s current tour."
Bodo, don´t lose sleep over this ignoramous he obviously doesn´t know an excellent site when it jumps up and bites him.
And I have to jump into defense of the Official site where he says "uses Flash--a mistake, in my opinion (especially when the easy-to-miss scroll arrows don´t work)," The scroll arrows do work. And many sites are frame based. Who is this idiots. He´s a right Victor Meldrew(someones going to ask me about this ;-) ) IMO.
Hugs
Micky X |
Ans Koenen
Dec-04-2003, 21:59 GMT
IP:
Netherlands
 | I searched a little bit around that site. Couldn´t figure out if it´s a guy or a woman, its a woman but a weird one.She wrote this review what is actually good but the other stuff on her site? She jumps from one thing to an other, she´s inconstant IMO.
Paul Simon
December 5, 2002
I constantly fall in Love with singer/songwriters: Jude, Nanci Griffith, Dar Williams, the Indigo Girls, Gordon Lightfoot--but usually it´s only temporary. I always come back to Paul Simon. He´s my current favorite musician and has been for many years. I´ve been a fan, sometimes an addict, for as long as I can remember, but I began collecting his music around the time when I started high school. The first album I owned was probably Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel, because it was the most accessible to me then and, next to Paul´s Graceland, the most popular. I´m sure I got S&G´s Sounds Of Silence early on, too; it contained the sweet and poignant songs that appealed to me then, like "Kathy´s Song" and "April Come She Will."
Paul Simon´s progression from popsy 1950´s songs to his latest album interests me. Along with Garfunkel, he had a folk period, keeping Bob Dylan company, before building a distinct S&G style that culminated in Bridge and Bookends. The first four five albums of Paul´s solo career blur together for me, but then came Hearts And Bones, Graceland, and Rhythm Of The Saints, The Capeman, and You´re The One, all unique. Each album is polished, complete, and different from anything that came before it.
Lately I´ve been reacquainting myself with one of my favorites, Hearts and Bones. The title song constantly gets stuck in my head. Like many of Paul´s other narrative songs, it´s all about a couple who´s relationship falls apart. (I´m under the impression that it refers to his marriage to Carrie Fisher, but I could be wrong.) The guitar instrumentation that forms the song´s introduction is about as beautiful as Paul gets, and the lyrics--"one-and-one-half wandering jews" (suggesting religion, travel, and a type of flower), "mountain passes slipping into stone," "Why don´t you love me for who I am where I am?"--stun me with poetry every time I listen to them.
The quality of Paul´s lyrics impress me most about Paul´s songs. He doesn´t get as personal as many singer/songwriters in his genre; on his latest album, for example, he chooses topics that are universal ("Old") or political ("Pigs, Sheep and Wolves") or narrative ("Darling Lorraine"). I respect the fact that he doesn´t allow himself the luxury of self-indulgence. He lets images and impressions, rather than the words themselves or "I am" statements, do the work of his brain and heart, and he comes off sounding intelligent, thoughtful, and compassionate.
But the way his music sounds accounts for a great deal of my adoration, too. He knows ten times more about melody and harmony and the construction of notes than all the top-40 artists put together. His songs always have a kind of melancholy, or bitterness, to them that aren´t always visible in the lyrics alone. He´s a guitar genius, evidence of which can be found in songs like "Anji" from Sounds of Silence (though he didn´t write the piece) and "Bookends Theme" from Bookends. And the way he manipulates the beat--"Allergies" from Hearts and Bones and "Hurricane Eye" from You´re The One, for example--simply delights me.
Recently Paul wrote a song called, "Father and Daughter" to be included on the soundtrack to "The Wild Thornberrys," an animated film. It´s about as sweet as a song can get without venturing into maudlin territory:
I´m gonna watch you shine
Gonna watch you grow
Gonna paint a sign
So you´ll always know
As long as one and one is two
There could never be a father
Who loved his daughter more than I love you.
It makes a nice companion piece to "St. Judy´s Comet" on There Goes Rhymin´ Simon, a lullaby to his son. He chooses Tenderness over violence almost every time, a rare trait in a popular artist.
You can find a list of Paul Simon´s solo albums, along with lyrics and audio clips and a photo gallery, on http://www.paulsimon.com, though it hasn´t been updated for years. A more comprehensive biography is at paul.simon.org, though this website, too, is sadly out of date.
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