Paul Simon

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul Simon, the American singer-songwriter and guitarist, nearly gave one of his best-known songs the wrong name. While writing music for the film The Graduate, he toyed with calling a new song "Mrs. Roosevelt." Art Garfunkel passed the indecision along to the film's director, Mike Nichols. Nichols answered, "Don't be ridiculous! We're making a movie here! It's Mrs. Robinson!"

  The small scene says a lot about how Simon works. He tinkers, he listens to the people around him, and he keeps changing direction.

  How did a boy from Queens who recorded under invented names become one of the most honored songwriters in America? Why did a hit record that he had no hand in finishing launch his career? What made him fly to Johannesburg, and why did that trip anger so many people? And what does a songwriter do after a very public flop on Broadway?

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• 2. Queens and Pseudonyms

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  Louis Simon played the double bass and led a dance band under the name Lee Sims, and his son Paul was born on the 13th of October 1941 in Newark, New Jersey. Louis was also a professor of education at the City College of New York. Paul's mother, Belle, taught elementary school. Both parents were Hungarian-Jewish, and in 1945 the family moved to the Kew Gardens Hills section of Flushing, Queens.

  Steely Dan's Donald Fagen later described this kind of childhood as that of "a certain kind of New York Jew, almost a stereotype really, to whom music and baseball are very important." Simon said the description was not far from the truth. He remembered his father as funny and smart, but a man who worked late and rarely saw his children.

  The radio program Make Believe Ballroom gave Simon his first taste of rock and roll, through "Gee" by The Crows. "It was really the first thing I heard on there that I liked. And it was really the first time I heard rock and roll," he recalled. His father came from the era of big bands and Sinatra, and he was unmoved by "Earth Angel." Simon summed up the gap this way: "He didn't buy it. But I love that record."

  In 1953, at the age of 11, Simon met Art Garfunkel. The two performed in a production of Alice in Wonderland for their sixth-grade graduation. By 13 they were singing together, occasionally at school dances. At 12 or 13 Simon wrote his first song, "The Girl for Me," which he says became the "neighborhood hit." His father wrote out the words and chords on paper for the boys to use. That sheet became the first officially copyrighted Simon and Garfunkel song, and it is now in the Library of Congress.

  In 1957, in their mid-teens, the pair recorded "Hey, Schoolgirl" as Tom & Jerry, a name chosen by their label, Big Records. The single reached number 49 on the Billboard charts. Between 1957 and 1964, Simon wrote, recorded, and released more than 30 songs. Most were on minor labels, including Amy, Big, Hunt, King, Tribute and Madison. He often performed them alone or with musicians other than Garfunkel. He also used pseudonyms such as Jerry Landis, Paul Kane, and True Taylor.

  By 1962, working as Jerry Landis, Simon was a frequent writer and producer for Amy Records artists, including Dotty Daniels, the Vels and Ritchie Cordell. He also enjoyed moderate success with the group Tico and the Triumphs, which released four 45s. Marty Cooper, known as Tico, sang lead on several of them. But Simon sang "Motorcycle," which reached number 99 on the Billboard charts in 1962. That same year, as Jerry Landis, he reached number 97 with the novelty song "The Lone Teen Ranger." Throughout this period he and Garfunkel admired the harmonies of the Everly Brothers.

  Simon graduated from Forest Hills High School and then majored in English at Queens College, finishing in 1963. Garfunkel studied mathematics education at Columbia University in Manhattan. Simon belonged to the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, and in 1963 he attended Brooklyn Law School for a single semester. The following year, 1964, the two friends would audition for Columbia Records.

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• 3. Folk Clubs and Overdubs

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  Clive Davis, an executive at Columbia Records, signed the duo to make an album after their audition in early 1964. Columbia decided to bill them as Simon & Garfunkel rather than Tom & Jerry. According to Simon, it was the first time a pop act had used surnames without first names. Their first LP, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., was released on the 19th of October 1964. It held 12 songs, five of them written by Simon, and it initially flopped.

  In 1965 Simon moved to London and began playing in folk clubs. Looking back in 1970, he said, "There was no place to play in New York City. They wouldn't have me." England's bohemian folk scene welcomed him instead. "I was 21, 22, and emotionally open to everything," he recalled.

  Martin Carthy taught Simon to finger-pick the acoustic guitar. Carthy was connected to the Watersons from Hull, and that link led Simon to "Scarborough Fair" and to old English songs unlike anything he had heard before. During this stretch he wrote "Homeward Bound" and "I Am a Rock." He also learned "Anji," a guitar instrumental by Davey Graham.

  The Paul Simon Songbook, a solo album of just his voice and guitar, was released only in the UK at first. In England he also produced the only album by Jackson C. Frank. He co-wrote several songs with Bruce Woodley of the Australian pop group the Seekers, including "I Wish You Could Be Here," "Cloudy" and "Red Rubber Ball." Simon also wrote "Someday, One Day" for the Seekers, and it charted around the same time as "Homeward Bound."

  Back in America, radio stations on the East Coast began getting requests for "The Sound of Silence," a track from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Their producer, Tom Wilson, overdubbed the track with electric guitar, bass guitar, and drums and released it as a single. He told neither Simon nor Garfunkel. Simon was "horrified" when he first heard it. The single reached number 1 on the U.S. pop charts. Its success drew Simon home to reunite with Garfunkel, and they recorded Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme in 1966, then Bookends in 1968.

  Kathy Chitty, whom Simon met at the Railway Inn Folk Club in Brentwood, Essex, did not follow him into that spotlight. She worked part-time selling tickets at the club. She was 18 and he was 22 when they began a relationship, and a photo of the two of them is on the cover of The Paul Simon Songbook. Kathy was quite shy and wanted no part in success and fame, so when Simon returned to the U.S. they ended the relationship. She is named in "Kathy's Song" and "America," and she is referred to in "Homeward Bound" and "The Late Great Johnny Ace."

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• 4. Breakup and Solo Run

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  Peggy Harper, whom Simon married in 1969, urged him to phone Clive Davis and confirm that Simon & Garfunkel were finished. The relationship between the two singers had grown strained, and the duo split in 1970. For the next several years they spoke only two or three times a year.

  Their last album together, Bridge over Troubled Water, was the best-selling album to date. The title track was inspired by a line from the Swan Silvertones' version of "Mary Don't You Weep." It reached number one, while "Cecilia" and "The Boxer" both made the top ten.

  In January 1972 Simon released Paul Simon, an album that began with an early experiment in world music. "Mother and Child Reunion" was inspired by reggae and recorded with Jimmy Cliff's band. It reached the Top 5 in both the United States and Britain. Critics gave the album universal acclaim, praising its variety of styles and confessional lyrics. It reached number 4 in the U.S. and number 1 in the UK and Japan. It also produced a second Top 30 hit, "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard."

  In April 1972 Simon played the Cleveland Arena alongside Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, at a benefit for George McGovern's presidential campaign. He reunited with Garfunkel in mid-June at Madison Square Garden for another McGovern concert.

  There Goes Rhymin' Simon arrived in May 1973. Its lead single, "Kodachrome," was a number 2 hit in the U.S. The gospel-flavored "Loves Me Like a Rock" topped the Cashbox charts, and the album reached number 1 on the Cashbox album charts. "American Tune" and "Something So Right," a tribute to Peggy, became part of his repertoire. In March 1974 he followed up with a live album, Live Rhymin', which contained elements of Latin and religious music.

  Still Crazy After All These Years came out in October 1975, produced by Simon and Phil Ramone. By then Simon and Peggy had a son, Harper Simon, born in 1972, but they divorced in 1975. The album, written after the divorce, has a darker mood. It includes "Gone at Last," a duet with Phoebe Snow. It also includes "My Little Town," a reunion track with Garfunkel that reached number 9 on Billboard. Simon wrote it for Garfunkel because he felt his old partner's solo work lacked "bite," and it also appeared on Garfunkel's album Breakaway. Despite popular belief, the song was not based on Simon's early life in New York City.

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• 5. Graceland and Beyond

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  A bootlegged tape of mbaqanga, the street music of South Africa, set Simon on the road to his best-known album. After hearing it, he decided to record an album of South African music. In 1986 he traveled to Johannesburg to record with African musicians, and further sessions took place in New York.

  Ladysmith Black Mambazo were the most notable of the many South African acts on the sessions. Simon also invited American artists. He sang a duet with Linda Ronstadt on "Under African Skies" and played with Los Lobos on "All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints."

  The album's title came early and by accident. Simon recalled, "Though I had no intentions of writing about Elvis Presley, the word 'Graceland' came very early." He tried to keep his lyrics true to the mood of the music, which he described as "flowing, pleasant and easy." The critic Stephen Holden wrote that listening to the album gives the sense of an artist "submitting to, and being swept up by, musical forces he does not totally understand." Holden added that Simon's urbane literary sensibility gave the songs a kind of double vision.

  Graceland, released in 1986, became Simon's most successful studio album, with estimated worldwide sales of more than 16 million copies. It won the 1987 Grammy for Album of the Year. "You Can Call Me Al" became one of his most successful singles. In 2006 the album entered the United States' National Recording Registry, described as "culturally, historically or aesthetically important."

  The trip to Johannesburg drew fire from organizations such as Artists United Against Apartheid. Anti-apartheid musicians including Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Jerry Dammers joined in, as did James Victor Gbeho, Ghana's Ambassador to the United Nations. All accused Simon of breaking the cultural boycott against South Africa's apartheid regime. Simon denied that he had gone to take money out of the country. He said he paid the black artists, split royalties with them, and was not paid to play to a white-only audience.

  The United Nations Anti-Apartheid Committee supported Graceland because it showcased black South African musicians and offered no support to the South African government. The African National Congress took the opposite view and protested that the album violated the boycott. The Congress voted to ban Simon from South Africa, and he was added to the United Nations blacklist. He was removed from that list in January 1987.

  Sessions for The Rhythm of the Saints began in December 1989 in Rio de Janeiro and New York. The Brazilian-flavored album featured the guitarist J.J. Cale along with Brazilian and African musicians. Released in October 1990, it was more introspective and low-key than Graceland. It peaked at number 4 in the U.S. and number 1 in the UK, and it received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. Its lead single, "The Obvious Child," featured the Grupo Cultural Olodum and became Simon's last Top 20 hit in the UK.

  On the 15th of August 1991, riding on the success of both albums, Simon gave a second concert in Central Park, with African and South American bands. The turnout surpassed all expectations. He later remembered it as "the most memorable moment in my career." The concert led to a live album and an Emmy-winning TV special. On the 4th of March 1992 he performed on an episode of MTV Unplugged. That same year, 1992, Nelson Mandela invited Simon and his band to play in South Africa.

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• 6. Setbacks and Honors

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  Salvador Agron, a real Puerto Rican youth, wore a cape while committing two murders in New York in 1959, and he became a writer in prison. His story became The Capeman, a musical Simon wrote with the poet Derek Walcott. Simon described it as "a New York Puerto Rican story based on events that happened in 1959," events he remembered. Marc Anthony played the young Agron and Rubén Blades the older Agron. The show opened on the 29th of January 1998.

  The Capeman received mixed reviews and poor box-office receipts, and it lost $11 million during its run. The critic Clive Barnes praised the score but called the show "West Side Story particularized, de-prettified and de-balleticized." A companion album, Songs from The Capeman, appeared in November 1997 to mixed reviews. For the first time in Simon's career, an album of his did not reach the Top 40 of the Billboard charts.

  In the aftermath, Simon's career was in an unexpected crisis, but he kept recording. In 1999 he embarked on a three-month North American tour with Bob Dylan. They alternated as the headline act and shared a middle section in which they performed together. Only one critic, Seth Rogovoy of the Berkshire Eagle, questioned the pairing.

  Simon wrote and recorded You're the One very quickly, and it was released in October 2000. It mostly combined folk-pop writing with foreign sounds, particularly grooves from North Africa. The album reached the Top 20 in both Britain and America and received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. After the September 11 attacks, Simon sang "Bridge Over Troubled Water" on the benefit broadcast America: A Tribute to Heroes and performed "The Boxer" at the start of the first Saturday Night Live episode that followed. In 2002 he wrote "Father and Daughter" for The Wild Thornberrys Movie, and it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Song.

  Surprise, made with Brian Eno, came out in May 2006. Most of its songs were inspired by the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War. Simon also drew on turning 60 in 2001, a milestone he joked about in "Old" from You're the One. The album reached number 14 on the Billboard 200 and number 4 in the UK. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote that Simon achieved his comeback "by being as restless and ambitious as he was at his popular and creative peak."

  In 2007 Simon became the first recipient of the Library of Congress's Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, named for George and Ira Gershwin. Stevie Wonder, Alison Krauss, Lyle Lovett, James Taylor, Marc Anthony and Ladysmith Black Mambazo were among the performers who paid tribute. The event was released as Paul Simon and Friends. Simon called the honor "a songwriter's dream come true." By then he had won sixteen Grammy Awards, three of them for Album of the Year. He is one of only eight artists to have won that award more than once as the main credited artist. In 2006 Time Magazine placed him among its "100 People Who Shaped the World." In 2015 Rolling Stone ranked him 8th on its list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.

  So Beautiful or So What was released on the 12th of April 2011, and Simon said it was the best work he had done in 20 years. Stranger to Stranger followed on the 3rd of June 2016. His son Adrian, a fan of the Italian electronic dance music artist Clap! Clap!, introduced them in 2011 while Simon toured in Italy. Together they worked on three songs, and the longtime friend Roy Halee co-produced the album. Afterward Simon said he was no longer interested in showbiz and talked about retirement. "I am going to see what happens if I let go," he said.

  On the 5th of February 2018, Simon announced his intention to retire from touring. He cited time away from his family and the death of his longtime guitarist Vincent Nguini. His farewell tour, Homeward Bound, began in May 2018 in Vancouver, and he played his final concert in Queens, New York, on the 22nd of September 2018. That same year he released In the Blue Light, a set of re-recordings of lesser-known songs, some with altered arrangements, harmonic structures and lyrics. On the 11th of August 2019 he returned to the stage and closed San Francisco's Outside Lands festival in Golden Gate Park.

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• 7. Garfunkel and Late Night

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  Eight songs from Simon's solo career filled the set list when Simon & Garfunkel played Central Park on the 19th of September 1981. Five were rearranged as duets, and Simon sang the other three alone. The resulting live album, TV special and videocassette were all major hits.

  After that success the duo returned to the studio, planning an album of new material. It would have been their first new recordings as a duo since "My Little Town" and their first full album of new work since Bridge over Troubled Water. Simon decided instead to wipe Garfunkel's vocals from the mix. In 1983 he released the result as a solo album, Hearts and Bones. Polished and confessional, it was eventually viewed as one of his best works, but it achieved the lowest sales of his career. It includes "The Late Great Johnny Ace," a song about the deaths of the R&B singer Johnny Ace and John Lennon, with an orchestral coda by Philip Glass.

  In 2003 Simon and Garfunkel performed together again when they received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. That reunion led to a U.S. tour, the acclaimed Old Friends concert series. A 2004 international encore culminated in a free concert at the Colosseum in Rome that drew an audience of 600,000. In 2005 they sang "Mrs. Robinson" and "Homeward Bound" at the Concert for New Orleans, a benefit for Hurricane Katrina victims. Aaron Neville joined them for "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

  Saturday Night Live gave Simon a second stage. He hosted the show's second episode, on the 18th of October 1975. On the 20th of November 1976, the Thanksgiving Day episode, he appeared alongside George Harrison, and they performed "Here Comes the Sun" and "Homeward Bound" together. Simon opened that show in a turkey outfit, singing "Still Crazy After All These Years." Halfway through the song he stopped the band, said he was embarrassed, gave the audience a speech and left the stage. Backstage he yelled at Lorne Michaels about the humiliating costume. It became one of the show's most replayed sketches.

  A 1986 sketch, made while Simon was promoting Graceland, showed him waiting in line for a movie with a friend. He astonished his friend by recalling intricate details about past meetings with passers-by. Then he drew a complete blank when Art Garfunkel walked up. When Simon hosted during the 1988 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Illinois Senator Paul Simon, a presidential candidate, walked out with him. The two argued over which Paul Simon was supposed to be hosting.

  On the 15th of February 2015, Simon closed the show's 40th anniversary special with "Still Crazy After All These Years." During the introductory sequence he played a snippet of "I've Just Seen a Face" with Sir Paul McCartney. On the 16th of February 2025 he sang "Homeward Bound" with Sabrina Carpenter to open the 50th anniversary special.

  Simon's first acting role came in Woody Allen's Annie Hall in 1977, where he played the music producer Tony Lacey. In 1981 he appeared in an episode of The Muppet Show, the only one in the series to use the songs of a single songwriter. On Sesame Street he performed "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" in 1977. In 1986 he made a cameo in the song "Put Down the Duckie!"

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• 8. Craft, Charity, Psalms

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  In a 2012 interview reprinted in American Songwriter, Simon listed the themes that run through his lyrics: love, family, social commentary, religion, spirituality, and God. "The music always precedes the words," he said. He called finding the right words "like a puzzle" to express what the music is saying. In 2023 he named his "two big influences" as New York City doo-wop and English folk music.

  Teaching came naturally to him. In 1970 Simon taught songwriting at New York University and hoped to help students avoid mistakes he had made. "You can teach somebody about writing songs. You can't teach someone how to write a song," he said. That year he also held auditions for a young songwriters' workshop at the invitation of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. The auditions were advertised in The Village Voice and brought hundreds of hopefuls. Six teenagers were chosen, including Melissa Manchester, Tommy Mandel and Joe Linus. Maggie and Terre Roche later sang backup for Simon and joined the workshop in progress.

  Simon took the six teenagers to Columbia studios to watch the recording process with the engineer Roy Halee. Downstairs, Bob Dylan was recording Self-Portrait, which included a version of Simon's "The Boxer." Violinist Isaac Stern visited with a CBS film crew and spoke to the young musicians about lyrics and music. Nick Laird-Clowes, another musician Simon mentored, credited him with shaping the Dream Academy's biggest hit, "Life in a Northern Town." Simon also contributed the lyrics of "Half of the People" to Leonard Bernstein's Mass in 1971.

  In 2003 Simon became a supporter of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit that provides free instruments and lessons to children in U.S. public schools. He is also a co-founder, with Irwin Redlener, of the Children's Health Fund. It began by placing specially equipped buses to carry medical care to children in under-served areas. The first bus went to the South Bronx of New York City, and the buses now operate in 12 states, including on the Gulf Coast.

  In May 2012 a benefit dinner in New York, where Simon performed, raised more than $2 million for Richard Leakey's Turkana Basin Institute in Africa. After reading Peter Singer's book The Life You Can Save, Simon became a supporter of effective altruism. He reflected on his years of benefit concerts: "You really have to know what and to whom you're giving this money." In 2015 he played a benefit for the Fistula Foundation. For his 2019 Outside Lands appearance, he donated his fee to the San Francisco Parks Alliance and Friends of the Urban Forest.

  Seven Psalms was released in April 2023, and Alex Gibney made a documentary about it, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon. The album runs 33 minutes without a break. It has seven acoustic guitar pieces linked by a motif derived from "Anji," the instrumental he learned in London. Its lyrics reflect on life, death, and faith. The idea arrived in 2020, when a dream woke him in the middle of the night. "A voice said 'You are meant to be working on a piece called 'Seven Psalms'," he recalled.

  Isolated by the COVID-19 pandemic on a Texas ranch, Simon spent months on the guitar pieces. He added sounds such as distant church bells, produced by amplified upside-down wine glasses. "I envisioned Seven Psalms as one long thought, combined with sounds powerful enough to make the thought come alive," he said. In a May 2023 interview with The Times, he revealed that he had lost most of the hearing in his left ear. He had planned to retire, but after the album's success he finished another song and composed four more guitar pieces. He was also planning an album of duets with his wife, the singer Edie Brickell, and had begun early work on a musical.

  In February 2025 Simon announced the Quiet Celebration Tour, with performances in smaller venues in 20 cities across the U.S. and Canada. Most cities had multiple nights in a row. It began with two shows at the Saenger Theater in New Orleans on the 4th and the 5th of April 2025 and ended with two filmed shows at McCaw Hall in Seattle on the 5th and the 6th of August 2025. Simon has since announced an extension, adding a European leg and a second North American leg for 2026.

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