I love things like this. It’s so rare to see a songwriter answer the question “how did you write this?” without resorting to slightly hostile grunts (largely because, you suspect, they either haven’t the faintest idea how they did it and don’t have the language to describe it, or else are a bit embarrassed by some of the stimuli: “actually, I’d just done a poo and was reading the Dandy, and the combination of the two made me think…”)
But this is Paul Simon, and if ever a man knew exactly what he was doing, and how and why he was doing it, it’s old Chuckles McFrivolous.
Credit where it’s due: got this from Helen Lewis’s unmissable Friday newsletter, The Bluestocking (link in comments).
https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1377566415348187140?s=21
Helen Lewis, btw, is the best. Here’s her newsletter.
https://helenlewis.substack.com/
Here’s a direct video rather than the one in the tweet. The BOTW bit is from about 5:20
What a fascinating video! That’s great.
What’s interesting as well is that he is actually talking specifically about piecing together the melody as opposed to the lyrics, and it’s actually unusual to hear a songwriter talk about that. Usually it’s, “Oh Hey Jude was about me talking to my dead mother…” and stuff like that. But this is a great insight into Paul Simon just sitting riffing on a guitar trying to find chords that flow together well.
He was a very slow songwriter, wasn’t he? He needed time to craft his songs properly.
That Bach chorale comment as well… interesting…. of course the Bach tune he mentions he also stole more blatantly for American Tune. I’d actually never really noticed the similarity between American Tune and Bridge Over Troubled Water before.
Genius steals, innit.
For ref, the chorale in question seems from his quick hum of it there to be O Haupt Voll Blut und Wunden, most famously appearing in the St Matthew Passion, usually rendered in English as O Sacred Head Sore Wounded. It’s about the most sublime music ever.
I love it when songwriters come clean about what they have stolen! Or when someone points out a steal… Ian Macdonald was excellent at this in his Beatles analyses. He made me realise that many of the Beatles melodies which seemed to original is just them cutting and pasting different bits of songs together. (Not that that’s a bad thing – it does take genius to put the right things in the right order to create a sparkling melody).
One little example that really tickles me (and isn’t really a Beatles song I suppose) is the “Whatever happened to….?” section of Free As A Bird. This of course is a direct steal from the almost identical “Whatever happened to….?” bit in The Shangri-La’s Remember (Walking In The Sand).
I think Radiohead aren’t that popular around here but I really like their total honesty about where a lot of their music comes from: “we were trying to rip off The Pixies / DJ Shadow / Autechre and we failed, but interestingly,” seems to be about the size of it.
I think the obsession with “originality” is something that only people who don’t know very much about art outside / before pop tend to hold to. It’s all built on existing foundations, sometimes very directly. Bach didn’t write the melody for O Haupt – he just simplified and arranged it. Shakespeare didn’t invent his plots, just his characters and language. Picasso didn’t spring fully formed into Cubist revolution, he built and developed from a starting point of being really really good at drawing, and absorbing / stealing ideas left right and centre.
Nicking stuff is the foundation of greatness. And the foundation of a load of dross too, natch.
Yes, I’m very forgiving of musical theft. My Sweet Lord/ He’s So Fine is maybe a step too far. But unlike many people, I think Stairway to Heaven/ Taurus IS a case of theft BUT is actually an okay theft. Sounds to me like Jimmy Page, consciously or unconsciously, started from the basis of the Spirit song but springboarded into a new thing entirely.
But let’s not get into Led Zeppelin and musical theft… that’s a big bluesy can of worms that has been opened many times before…
If Chuck Berry had been paid properly and/or taken everyone to court who owed him for borrowing, he’d have been fantastically wealthy.
Can’t blame him for being insistent of being paid in cash for the last three or four decades of his life.
And there again, Chuck could have given the proper credit to his piano player Johnny Johnson, but didn’t.
He didn’t say “I nicked it from Los Lobos,” then?
https://www.laweekly.com/los-lobos-on-paul-simon-do-you-mean-zydeco-when-you-say-zy-decko/
…or Martin Carthy.
Scarborough unfair. I recall Carthy talking about this at one of his birthday party concerts, (someone had mentioned the Scarborough Fair arrangement on a Facebook post) I looked it up, seems Carthy’s publisher had been benefitting.
Eventually Carthy grew tired of, in his own words, the “trudge through the grudge”. It turned out that his own publisher had, without his knowledge, copyrighted his arrangement and had been receiving royalties from Simon all along (Carthy had somehow managed to sign away his own claim in the small print of a contract). Carthy and Simon, reconciled, joined forces to sing the song in London in 1998, closing that circle.
Plus nicking a 17th C folk song which Carthy himself got it off McColl/Seeger isn’t quite in the league of what Los Lobos man alleges above, is it? Weird that they credited it to S & G rather than trad. arr. though, right enough.
That Trad Arr guy must have a solid gold house by now!
Do you buy that? Paul Simon, who is, lest we forget, PAUL SIMON… needed to “steal” outright from a band of perfectly ok, competent LA also-rans? I’m always a bit wary of stories like that because how does someone in Simon’s position get to deny it with any grace? LL can mouth off swearily in public knowing full well he’s unlikely to make anything of it for all kinds of reasons.
I can see how it could (PS having a gak-related block for example) or couldn’t have happened, to be honest.
Yeah, fair enough.
Well the song itself is very very Los Lobos, I believe them. Having read the biography of PS that was on Kindle for 99p my opinion of him plummeted. Still he is/was a major talent, just a bit of a jerk.
I’ve never actually read a biography of Paul Simon. Will need to remedy that. I posted recently about Bookends and I was a little sniffy about it, but I have grown to love it and it has sent me back to my other Paul Simon stuff.
Any recommendations for a good Paul Simon biography anyone?
The one I read was by Robert Hilburn, worth 99p for sure
I love Paul Simon and all of his work except the Capeman which I can’t get into at all. Although I love his music I cant help thinking that a good biography about him would be much more appealing than an Autobiography. He is much too earnest.