Speaker 1: Pushkin. Paul Simon's one of the greatest living songwriters. Since
Speaker 1: debuted with Art Garfunkel in nineteen fifty seven, Paul's written
Speaker 1: countless songs that are quintessential to the American psyche. This year,
Speaker 1: at eighty one years old, he's released the latest edition
Speaker 1: to his beloved catalog Seven Psalms, to an outpouring of
Speaker 1: critical acclaim. In twenty twenty one, Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce
Speaker 1: Headlam released the audio original Miracle and Wonder Conversations with
Speaker 1: Paul Simon. It's an intimate look into Simon's songwriting, alongside
Speaker 1: never before heard live studio versions of hits including The Boxer,
Speaker 1: The Sound of Silence, and of course Graceland. If you
Speaker 1: haven't listened to Miracle and Wonder, I highly recommend checking
Speaker 1: it out. It's available on Audible and at Pushkin dot FM.
Speaker 1: This fall, at Pushkin will be releasing an updated version
Speaker 1: of the audiobook with a brand new chapter featuring even
Speaker 1: more from Malcolm and Paul's newly recorded deep dive into
Speaker 1: Seven Psalms. To celebrate this newest chapter in Paul Simon's
Speaker 1: sixty five year career and the latest edition to Miracle
Speaker 1: and wonder. On today's episode of Broken Record, Malcolm Gladwell
Speaker 1: sits back down with Paul to discuss the creation of
Speaker 1: his newest album. Paul explains why he Field's music reviews
Speaker 1: are more about the writer than the piece of music
Speaker 1: being critiqued, and he talks about why many of his
Speaker 1: lyrics take a more conversational bent. He also recalls how
Speaker 1: the title for his newest record came to him in
Speaker 1: a dream after he considered never writing another piece of
Speaker 1: music again. This is Broken Record liner notes for the
Speaker 1: digital age. I'm justin ritchman. Here's Malcolm Gladwell with Paul Simon.
Speaker 2: So how you been he this album? I was reading
Speaker 2: through the reviews. I was like, can I find a
Speaker 2: bad review? I can't find one. This has never happened.
Speaker 2: I'm so used to getting bad reviews myself that when
Speaker 2: someone like you like hit for the cycle on this
Speaker 2: is like, there's no.
Speaker 3: That's a great I like, I love all baseball metaphors. Well,
Speaker 3: it's very pleasant to have a hit.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: I don't read reviews, so I didn't read any of them.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you they are one hundred percent. They are rhapsodic.
Speaker 2: You should read them. There's the fantastic. They're like, you know, if.
Speaker 3: I do read them, I will not be happy. The
Speaker 3: reviews are about the reviewer. Yeah, so number one, you
Speaker 3: you're getting an insight into somebody's ego, which is sort
Speaker 3: of private in a way. So I'm not really comfortable
Speaker 3: with that. Number Two, some people get what I'm doing
Speaker 3: and other people don't really get one what I'm doing.
Speaker 3: They still, evidently with these reviews, they still like it,
Speaker 3: maybe even like it a lot, but I don't. They
Speaker 3: don't go to the reasons that I put there. So, like,
Speaker 3: I'll give you an example of things that I've heard,
Speaker 3: because I haven't read any He's dealing with his mortality.
Speaker 3: I can understand that somebody would say it's not happens
Speaker 3: not to be the case. You know, the way that
Speaker 3: I write, I would say from that they're probably mostly
Speaker 3: going on the song. Wait. You know the way that
Speaker 3: I write is it's partly true personally, it's partly like
Speaker 3: a wish that I have, It's partly other people's lives.
Speaker 3: But it's a it's a character. Even though the character
Speaker 3: is me, it's not really me. It's a character. So
Speaker 3: that character is dealing with the issue of Mortality. That's
Speaker 3: because the way that song was written maybe one of
Speaker 3: the last or the last song. The reason that it's
Speaker 3: placed there is because that's a way to conclude the piece.
Speaker 3: So it's appropriate, but it's not consuming my time and thought.
Speaker 3: Of course, it's it's there, of course, but I'm not
Speaker 3: getting something out that that I have to say. I'm
Speaker 3: concluding this long piece in such a way that it
Speaker 3: feels hopefully that it feels satisfying.
Speaker 2: Did you right Weight, thinking that it was going to
Speaker 2: be the final.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wrote it as the final piece, so I
Speaker 3: think it was either Weight or Trail of Volcanoes that
Speaker 3: was the final piece that I wrote. What happened with
Speaker 3: Trailer Volcanos was I had another song and it didn't
Speaker 3: fit anywhere, and so I said, I have to lose
Speaker 3: this one. It does It's good. It was a guitar piece.
Speaker 3: It wasn't a written song, but it didn't fit musically anywhere.
Speaker 3: I just couldn't find its place. I was at that
Speaker 3: point in the construction of the piece or the album
Speaker 3: where my craftsmanship and my editing is dictating what I'm doing.
Speaker 3: It says to me that is slowing everything down. No
Speaker 3: matter where you put it, and I'm looking for something
Speaker 3: to continue the momentum, to get to the final lord
Speaker 3: and the conclusion. Even though I didn't know what the
Speaker 3: conclusion was at that point, I understood from years of
Speaker 3: making records that it wasn't right for the set. So
Speaker 3: I tossed it out and I said, I need a
Speaker 3: piece that has more of a sense of rhythm than
Speaker 3: the rest of the album, because the rest of the
Speaker 3: album is very free rhythmically. There's no drums, there's no bass,
Speaker 3: but a Trail of Volcanoes comes from a loop a
Speaker 3: bell of bells, so it's got a real pulse to it.
Speaker 3: Even though I don't keep the bells going all the time,
Speaker 3: I remove them and bring them back. But that served
Speaker 3: a good purpose for where it was in the album,
Speaker 3: just in terms of of your ear, not in terms
Speaker 3: of subject matter. So that piece found was placed where
Speaker 3: it is in the album for those reasons, and the
Speaker 3: end piece is there also as an end piece. And
Speaker 3: then from those two decisions, I then wrote wrote the lyrics.
Speaker 3: I didn't know what I was going to write in
Speaker 3: Trail of Volcanoes, which in a way you can tell
Speaker 3: from from the way it begins. Some of my songs
Speaker 3: begin very conversationally to me. That's if I had to
Speaker 3: look at some old song and tell you what was
Speaker 3: I thinking, even if I couldn't remember it, I would say, oh,
Speaker 3: I didn't know what I was thinking. So I just
Speaker 3: began and Trail of Volcanoes. When I was young, I
Speaker 3: carried my geto. You know, that's a simple sentence. I
Speaker 3: don't know what the point of I don't know what
Speaker 3: the point of the piece would be, but I did
Speaker 3: have the line trail of volcanoes. It was in my notes.
Speaker 3: So that's what that song does. As it happens, it
Speaker 3: has an appropriate thought for the entire piece. But as
Speaker 3: far as the ear goes, it's the repetitive rhythm that
Speaker 3: gives the ear a sense of I don't know, hopefully,
Speaker 3: hopefully it gives it a pleasure after things have been
Speaker 3: sort of floating and not exactly a rhythmic, but not
Speaker 3: with a tight rhythm. Here's a loop and weight becomes.
Speaker 3: After these six songs, what subject would I be on?
Speaker 3: And someone I played it for at that early stage said,
Speaker 3: heard the first six and I just had the track
Speaker 3: for the seventh, and said, hearing these first six, I
Speaker 3: just feel like I really don't want to die, and
Speaker 3: there was the subject of wait, so anyway back to
Speaker 3: reviews and critics, that's how that came about. But if
Speaker 3: you were writing and saying, well, mortality is on his mind,
Speaker 3: it's not wrong to say that, but it's I'm not
Speaker 3: interested in as a thought because it's not actually what
Speaker 3: I was thinking. What I was thinking was sort of
Speaker 3: mundane compared to the idea of me contemplating my mortality.
Speaker 3: I was constructing a piece.
Speaker 2: Yeah, go back a little bit. I was curious. The
Speaker 2: last record you had made prior to this was twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: So this is the this is the longest break you
Speaker 2: took between right music, new songs, new songs in your life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it probably was when I stopped performing and said
Speaker 3: I'm going to stop, which I think was in twenty eighteen. Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of my thoughts was, well, first of all, I thought,
Speaker 3: this show that I'm doing, I've really taken it as
Speaker 3: far as I can take it in terms of rethinking
Speaker 3: songs and arrangements and anything that I did to that
Speaker 3: show as it then existed, it really would be in
Speaker 3: the danger zone of being real Coco, you know, just
Speaker 3: be adding little things. And because I thought it's really
Speaker 3: right now, So I don't want to continue doing this
Speaker 3: because I'm not going to get to the nourishment of
Speaker 3: rethinking songs and arrangements because they're really pretty well thought out.
Speaker 3: And if I don't get that, then i'd I don't
Speaker 3: like performing because I'm bored. So I thought it's completed.
Speaker 3: Its cycle is completed. It's not a bad time to stop.
Speaker 3: And as for writing, if I continued writing from the
Speaker 3: way that I wrote the last piece of original music,
Speaker 3: which was A Stranger to Stranger, I would be continuing
Speaker 3: problem solving in a way that started when I began
Speaker 3: to write when I was thirteen. So from the age
Speaker 3: of thirteen, when I wrote my first songs, my songwriting
Speaker 3: evolved in the way that the way my songwriting evolved.
Speaker 3: So if I think of it as problem solving, I
Speaker 3: would continue problem solving in the same way. And from that,
Speaker 3: this is my internal conversation. I said, so I can
Speaker 3: make an album that's as good as Stranger the Stranger again,
Speaker 3: and I thought that album was good, but I'm not
Speaker 3: really enticed to do that, so I'll just not do it.
Speaker 3: I'll just stop, And if I want to find something
Speaker 3: that's challenging, and that's new for me. The way to
Speaker 3: do that is to shut everything down and begin again.
Speaker 3: That was my thought. I didn't then start to work
Speaker 3: on anything because time went by, and then I had
Speaker 3: this dream that said, oh, you were writing seven psalms
Speaker 3: or you should be writing seven psalms. So I began,
Speaker 3: you know, whether it was subconsciously or not, I don't
Speaker 3: know it. But I began to start from scratch again,
Speaker 3: picked up a guitar, and the wrote guitar pieces, and
Speaker 3: you know, got more thinking about how I played guitar,
Speaker 3: and just I went back to what was the simplest way,
Speaker 3: and I started to build from there. After about a
Speaker 3: year of writing guitar pieces, words started to come also
Speaker 3: from dreams, which is unusual for me. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: it's happened in the past that I've thought of a
Speaker 3: line or two, but that's not usually the way I
Speaker 3: The way I write this was this was unusual.
Speaker 2: Do you remember can you even play for me the
Speaker 2: first little bit of music that got you going on this?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the first thing that I did was to play that,
Speaker 3: really the first song, that's where I had, and then
Speaker 3: I began to put Eventually it got into a pattern
Speaker 3: which was.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 3: The first one was that was the first one. The
Speaker 3: second pattern that I play is twice, so so the
Speaker 3: first two patterns are The third pattern was another variation.
Speaker 2: M h.
Speaker 3: Those four variations on the on that lick, they were
Speaker 3: necessitated by the lyrics that I was singing.
Speaker 2: Explain what you mean by that.
Speaker 3: The Lord is my engineer, I don't want. The Lord
Speaker 3: is my engineer, lost, my use and.
Speaker 4: Loss. The earth Lord is the earth ride on.
Speaker 3: So that's why the first is long. The second is
Speaker 3: did dobby loss of face in the atmosphere, the path
Speaker 3: I slip and slide on. That's the conclusion of those things.
Speaker 3: So once I had written those words, I said, well,
Speaker 3: the guitar part has to go this way.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see. You begin with the guitar part, write
Speaker 2: the lyrics and then adapt. Then you start to Then
Speaker 2: you start and fiddle.
Speaker 3: You write something that's just comes to you for reasons
Speaker 3: that you can't explain, and you start to think of
Speaker 3: what you might say over that, and when you find
Speaker 3: what you want to say, you modify the accompaniment so
Speaker 3: that it fits. Then it becomes a symmetrical pattern, and
Speaker 3: that pattern is repeated throughout every time the Lord's section comes,
Speaker 3: that pattern is repeated.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break and then come
Speaker 1: back with more from Malcolm Gladwell and Paul Simon. We're
Speaker 1: back with more from Malcolm Gladwell and Paul Simon.
Speaker 2: Can you give me another example from of the kind
Speaker 2: of loop between the music and the lyrics that you
Speaker 2: were working on with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The process for me is a thought that comes
Speaker 3: from someplace that I have I don't know, just one
Speaker 3: second it's not there, the next second it's there. And
Speaker 3: with that piece of information, it then gets put into
Speaker 3: the pile of potentially to be edited that pile and
Speaker 3: the words start to come and as if it was
Speaker 3: as if you were sculpting a piece of wood or stone,
Speaker 3: you slice away and chip away to find the right shape.
Speaker 3: And in the case of the Seven Psalms album, because
Speaker 3: it's really a voice and guitar, even though there are
Speaker 3: a lot of other instruments augmenting the sound of the guitar,
Speaker 3: essentially what you're hearing is a voice and a guitar,
Speaker 3: which means that particular attention has to be paid to
Speaker 3: what the guitar is playing and the dynamics of the
Speaker 3: guitar the volume of you know how soft it gets,
Speaker 3: and because that's an acoustic guitar, just the way you
Speaker 3: play it automatically has in the nature of it is
Speaker 3: that some notes are going to be louder than others
Speaker 3: because of the way the guitar is built and just acoustics.
Speaker 3: So one of the things that happened in Seven Psalms
Speaker 3: that was different from the other albums is that I
Speaker 3: really paid a lot of attention to making the notes,
Speaker 3: the individual notes of a piece be balanced and have
Speaker 3: a dynamic to them. So if one note stuck out
Speaker 3: in a way I didn't want, I could lower it
Speaker 3: in pro tools, or the opposite. If it was too
Speaker 3: soft and I needed it to punch more, I could
Speaker 3: raise it it. So one of the things that's unique
Speaker 3: about Seven Psalms for me is that I'm treating the
Speaker 3: guitar as an entire orchestra. I use the rhythm of
Speaker 3: it that's partly drum. There's not drum there, and even
Speaker 3: when I play that, I'm muting it partly, whereas I'm
Speaker 3: not muting this. So because it's just a guitar and
Speaker 3: a voice, I'm paying a lot of attention to what's
Speaker 3: going on with the guitar. And from that I'm adding
Speaker 3: these other percussion instruments, mostly bells, but gongs. I can
Speaker 3: show you there's a bell. I don't know why this
Speaker 3: is called an elephant bell, but so here it is.
Speaker 3: It's not so much the hit that I'm interested in.
Speaker 3: It's the it's the overtones that are gonna continueing. Has
Speaker 3: a little pulse, so I would attach that to certain notes.
Speaker 2: Where does that sound to use? What's throughout?
Speaker 3: The rabbit just must probably used one hundred times?
Speaker 2: And is that it? It's called an elephant bell.
Speaker 3: It's called an elephant is it.
Speaker 2: Actually a kind of vintage? It's not new.
Speaker 3: I don't know how old it is.
Speaker 2: It's very unusual looking.
Speaker 3: It doesn't look it doesn't look it's probably uh, it's
Speaker 3: probably Asian.
Speaker 2: It's kind of claws on it.
Speaker 3: It's probably you know, uh, out of the Indonesian world.
Speaker 2: Where did you get it?
Speaker 3: Well? I have a lot of different percussion instruments. Some
Speaker 3: I picked up on the road. Some are given to
Speaker 3: me by guys in the band because they knew I
Speaker 3: was interested in percussion, So over the years have collected
Speaker 3: a lot of it. So the guitar has a has
Speaker 3: a bell in it, It has a ring in it,
Speaker 3: and sometimes that attach this spell to it. Very subtly.
Speaker 2: It's not meant to.
Speaker 3: Be, you know, really noticed as much as felt. This
Speaker 3: bell that I'm holding now is called this is what
Speaker 3: we call this a spinning bell.
Speaker 2: Oh that's lovely.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you can hear it with this microphone,
Speaker 3: but it goes. That's a different bell use at a
Speaker 3: different time.
Speaker 2: It's just like a brass.
Speaker 3: A four inches wide and it sort of looks like
Speaker 3: a pointy hat and it's an eighth of an inch thick,
Speaker 3: and it's made out of brass, and it has a string.
Speaker 3: And you spin this string around so that when it unwinds,
Speaker 3: it spins, and as it spins it the sound changes.
Speaker 3: I'll do it again. I don't know whether these microphones
Speaker 3: are going to be able to pick this up, but
Speaker 3: that's just one of ten different sounds that I used.
Speaker 3: And for me, if you consider this record to be
Speaker 3: a spiritually oriented record, the spirituality is mostly expressed in
Speaker 3: the music, even though the words are on the same subject.
Speaker 3: But the unspoken, the silent conversation, so to speak, well,
Speaker 3: the conversation without words is the deeper spiritual for me
Speaker 3: because it's an express it's some expression of something that
Speaker 3: I hear and feel without words. So, going back to reviews,
Speaker 3: if you're not focused on that aspect, and most reviewers
Speaker 3: are not going to focus on that because most reviewers
Speaker 3: are writers, and so they focus on words. Some reviewers
Speaker 3: or musicians as well, and they hear these other things.
Speaker 3: When I was mixing the record, I played played this
Speaker 3: for a musician friend of mine who happened to be
Speaker 3: in another adjacent studio, and he said, I like to
Speaker 3: listen to it at home, and then when he saw
Speaker 3: me the next day, he said, I kept thinking to myself,
Speaker 3: did I just hear I thought I heard a glimmer
Speaker 3: of and then I wasn't sure. I kept thinking throughout
Speaker 3: the record, did I just hear that sound that I
Speaker 3: imagine that's exactly what I wanted? Who is the musician?
Speaker 2: It was Chris Steely, who was a brilliant mandolin player,
Speaker 2: and he was hearing one of those percussion notes that whether.
Speaker 3: He was hearing that or it could have been any
Speaker 3: number of things. Because I viewed there are so many
Speaker 3: subtle sounds used throughout this piece, so many but the
Speaker 3: way I was hearing and the way he heard it
Speaker 3: was as if the sound stretched all the way to
Speaker 3: a horizon and I could just about make out what
Speaker 3: the sound was that in the farthest place away. So
Speaker 3: that that's a very deep, not deep, you know, intellectual
Speaker 3: expiracy of it. It has a deep visual perspective to sound.
Speaker 3: It goes way back, and it makes the guitar, this
Speaker 3: simple acoustic guitar sound bigger. Anyway, That's what I'm trying
Speaker 3: to But.
Speaker 2: Wait, Paul, that was a review that you liked. I mean, effectively,
Speaker 2: he was a reviewer and you liked what he had
Speaker 2: to It's like, conceptually.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because what he said was exactly what I hoped for.
Speaker 3: His interests was really piqued, but he wasn't sure whether
Speaker 3: his interest was meant to be peaked or whether he
Speaker 3: imagined it. Well, that's great because now you're really interested.
Speaker 3: Did I hear that I loved his question? Did I
Speaker 3: hear that? Well? Question, the answer is yes, you did.
Speaker 3: And when you become aware that there's an entire conversation
Speaker 3: going on way in the background that's related to what's
Speaker 3: going on in the foreground with guitar and voice, then
Speaker 3: for me as the composer, it's much more interesting. But
Speaker 3: that doesn't mean that when people listen to this record
Speaker 3: that they have to be aware of that. Most people,
Speaker 3: they're not supposed to be aware of it. It's just
Speaker 3: supposed to be pleasurable, just supposed to say, I really
Speaker 3: like that. Why, I don't know, I just liked it.
Speaker 3: That's fine, that's what. That's how most people hear musicians
Speaker 3: say what was that sound, because they're trained to do that.
Speaker 2: Well, in this case, I was going to talk about
Speaker 2: the good. Problem is that the lyrics are so good
Speaker 2: that you get distracted. I listened to it several times. Well,
Speaker 2: one of the times I listened to it the way
Speaker 2: I remember listening to records in the day, when you'd
Speaker 2: have the lyrics from the album cover and you would
Speaker 2: read the lyrics as you were hearing them. And you
Speaker 2: do that, you know, and one of your first year
Speaker 2: second listeners, just so you can kind of locate everything.
Speaker 2: And I was doing that. I was doing this yesterday,
Speaker 2: and I was like, you know, it was incredibly important
Speaker 2: because maybe really focus for a moment on the tree.
Speaker 2: And I was gonna touch with this because I think
Speaker 2: the writing here is as some of the best you've
Speaker 2: ever done. It's exquisite. There's a and I say it
Speaker 2: says now I'm responding as a writer, because I'm a writer.
Speaker 2: There's a little bit. For example, in my professional opinion,
Speaker 2: the line about the cows is as funny a line
Speaker 2: as you've as you've written.
Speaker 3: I had that line for a long time.
Speaker 2: I heard two cows in a conversation. One called the
Speaker 2: other one a name in my professional opinion, all cows
Speaker 2: in the country was spear of the blame. I mean,
Speaker 2: come on, it's like that's in the pantheon of great falls.
Speaker 2: I'm a line.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know what that pantheon is, but anyway,
Speaker 3: to me, the funny thing was the two cows in conversation,
Speaker 3: and that came from a montalk where I lived. There's
Speaker 3: like a on the road that I drive up to
Speaker 3: our places. There's a big field and there are cows there,
Speaker 3: and you know, two cows were like leaning over the
Speaker 3: leaning over the fence. And so I thought of that
Speaker 3: line and wrote it down. It wasn't for anything. It
Speaker 3: was just a line that I saved and put in
Speaker 3: there my professional opinion. You know, I should say this, really,
Speaker 3: I think the truth is that for people who enjoy
Speaker 3: enjoyed this record, the enjoyment is not enhanced by me
Speaker 3: explaining any of this stuff. I don't think it helps.
Speaker 3: It's better left unexplained. If it's your job to understand
Speaker 3: how records are put together, either you're a writer, or
Speaker 3: you're a musician, or you're a producer or an engineer,
Speaker 3: well then you're really interested in it. But as a
Speaker 3: person who's not that and just an average listener, they
Speaker 3: don't need to know that I put this bill over
Speaker 3: here for this reason or that. Or it's either an
Speaker 3: idea that works and people like it and in this
Speaker 3: case they seem to really like it, or it doesn't work,
Speaker 3: or you know, and people don't. They don't hear it,
Speaker 3: and they're they're not interested, which is also a fact
Speaker 3: that that's going on too. There's a lot of people
Speaker 3: who never heard this, never will and don't care.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we don't want to go back to fecial
Speaker 2: meaning for a moment, just because that was the when
Speaker 2: I was kind of fixating on. Can you talk a
Speaker 2: little bit about how the interaction between the music and
Speaker 2: the words In that case.
Speaker 3: This is about the structure of the entire piece. The
Speaker 3: first two songs, The Lord and Love is like a braid.
Speaker 3: They have a certain feel to them, more like ballads
Speaker 3: and a certain mood. I don't know what you call
Speaker 3: want to call it, doesn't matter what you want to
Speaker 3: call it. It has a certain mood. So this again
Speaker 3: goes to me as an editor of the piece that
Speaker 3: I'm working on. I think the listener who has heard
Speaker 3: this first two songs and it's probably about eight or
Speaker 3: nine minutes worth, they have inferred a certain mood about
Speaker 3: this piece. But I don't want that to happen, so
Speaker 3: I purposefully make the third piece to break that inference.
Speaker 3: So instead of having pieces that were.
Speaker 2: Which was The Lord or.
Speaker 3: That kind of playing, I'm playing something that's like a
Speaker 3: kind of an old bluesy Jimmy Reid kind of that's
Speaker 3: a very different mood.
Speaker 2: You don't stop, don't stop. I'm enjoying myself.
Speaker 3: For the reason I can't remember, you know, the reason
Speaker 3: I'm not playing more is that, well, I haven't played
Speaker 3: it in a long time, so I'm sort of going
Speaker 3: by muscle memory.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The reason when you said that the this isn't
Speaker 2: really just an album, you confronting your mortality and The
Speaker 2: reason I agree with that is that that song you're
Speaker 2: having so much fun. It's like there's there's everything. There's
Speaker 2: mischief in it, there's a little bit of street sass,
Speaker 2: there's I can see you as a kid on the
Speaker 2: streets of Queens, like you're both commenting on and kind
Speaker 2: of mocking a little bit of you know, the popular culture.
Speaker 2: I don't know. It's just like, it's not a song
Speaker 2: about a guy at the end of his life confronting
Speaker 2: his mortality. It's about a song about a guy in
Speaker 2: the middle of everything, like you know, right, fun in.
Speaker 3: That it has fun and it has jokes. Yes, it
Speaker 3: has good morning, mister indignation. It's so the mood of
Speaker 3: the first two pieces is changed, or hopefully is changed
Speaker 3: by the rhythm of this piece and the lyrics which
Speaker 3: have jokes or humor in them as well as their commentary,
Speaker 3: and it by the end of the pieces, the piece
Speaker 3: is summed up with all that really matters is the
Speaker 3: one who became us, anointed and gamed with his opinion.
Speaker 3: So that brings me back to the theme of where
Speaker 3: the entire piece is headed. And now I'm set for
Speaker 3: really the beginning of the album. Your forgiveness. From here on,
Speaker 3: it's going to be sort of intense and growing. So
Speaker 3: the first the first two songs introduce you to the
Speaker 3: mood and the theme. The third song says, don't get
Speaker 3: too settled into that and think that this is not
Speaker 3: what people are thinking. This is what I'm thinking as
Speaker 3: someone who's observing attention span of a listening audience or
Speaker 3: imagining their attention span and trying to make it as
Speaker 3: enjoyable as possible by not allowing you to get bored
Speaker 3: too early.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's very I mean, remembering back to our
Speaker 2: long conversations two years ago. It's typical of your kind
Speaker 2: of writing and communication style that you'd like to establish
Speaker 2: something and then say, wait a minute, wait a minute,
Speaker 2: and then the humor often comes in you amending the
Speaker 2: impression that you've given.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a line someone in one of the reviews,
Speaker 2: someone qullted that lovely line where you said, I'm a
Speaker 2: man who likes to travel, but maybe not since I lived.
Speaker 2: What's the line?
Speaker 3: Oh, that's from Darling Lorraine. That's a perfect example of this.
Speaker 3: I think that might have been the first time that
Speaker 3: I may have used that kind of joke. The line
Speaker 3: is all my life I've been a wanderer, which I
Speaker 3: wrote because I just make up things as I'm searching
Speaker 3: for a melody. I wrote that line and thought, what bullshit,
Speaker 3: you know, So what it ends up in the song
Speaker 3: is all my life. I've been a wanderer. Not really,
Speaker 3: I mostly lived in my parents' home. Anyway, Lorraine and
Speaker 3: I got married, and I love that the subject changes
Speaker 3: completely one hundred day degrees. He says a line it's
Speaker 3: just a lie. Then he says, ah, you know that's bullshit.
Speaker 3: Really anyway, back to Lorraine and I. We got married,
Speaker 3: and that's the way conversations are. We don't just talk
Speaker 3: on one straight subject. We do this and then there's
Speaker 3: an interruption and we go over here and we say, oh,
Speaker 3: that reminds me I have to pick up my clothes
Speaker 3: at the cleaners, or a funny thing that somebody said.
Speaker 3: It's just the mind changes all the time, and songs
Speaker 3: can be the same, and when they are it doesn't
Speaker 3: upset the listener. I don't think.
Speaker 1: We have to pause for another quick break, and then
Speaker 1: we'll come back with more from Malcolm Gladwell and Paul Simon.
Speaker 1: We're back with the rest of Malcolm Gladwell's conversation with
Speaker 1: Paul Simon.
Speaker 2: My favorite component I don't I guess we don't want
Speaker 2: to call them songs. I don't know what we call them.
Speaker 2: But Sacred Heart is the one that I was really
Speaker 2: drawn to. I wanted to talk about that one because
Speaker 2: it has on just on the writing front. There's that
Speaker 2: one little bit about when the kids get in the
Speaker 2: car and they say they would have motored down. I
Speaker 2: haven't been done here. And then we talked about the
Speaker 2: boy about he doesn't talk much anymore, just to the
Speaker 2: voices inside his head. The boy just gazed down at
Speaker 2: the floor and nodded once or twice at what she said.
Speaker 2: That little section begins with her voice was a blend
Speaker 2: of regional perfumes. We have no destination. It's another one
Speaker 2: of those things where I was like, this is as
Speaker 2: beautiful and perfect a section, lyrical section as you've ever done.
Speaker 3: It's like, thank you.
Speaker 2: It's an entire scene, in a brilliant, moving, powerful scene
Speaker 2: in four lines.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I could use you as well, my reviewer.
Speaker 3: You can review all my stuff. But I now, I
Speaker 3: don't know where that came from. Her voice, blend of
Speaker 3: regional perfume. But it sang perfectly, and it also had
Speaker 3: a description of when you.
Speaker 2: Say you, when you say it, it sang perfectly, what
Speaker 2: do you mean?
Speaker 3: It had the right syllables and the right sound to
Speaker 3: go with the melody that I wanted to sing. I
Speaker 3: didn't have to push ors fitted in or it was
Speaker 3: a natural flow of words. But they also were an
Speaker 3: interesting description that I think would be easily understood. You
Speaker 3: could imagine what that would be. And it also implies
Speaker 3: one thing about her as it's very womanly. And the
Speaker 3: other is that it feels southern too. To me, it's
Speaker 3: like regional perfume. I don't think of it as New
Speaker 3: York perfume, you know, I think of it as Southern.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that country Maine is not a perfumed accent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it feels like it's Texas, which is where it
Speaker 3: was set. In my mind.
Speaker 2: You wrote that lyric here, yeah, And.
Speaker 3: That's why Edie's voice, which it serves, serves the song
Speaker 3: in several ways that are powerful. I think first of all,
Speaker 3: you're not expecting to hear another voice come in on
Speaker 3: the record. That has only been me and the guitars
Speaker 3: so far, so it's a surprise and Edie is from Texas,
Speaker 3: and she sings great no matter what she does. She's
Speaker 3: one of those people that you know, has perfect pitch
Speaker 3: and sings in tune all the time. It's very end
Speaker 3: of your But she's also naturally inhabits that character. So
Speaker 3: to me, she sounds like like that character. And it's
Speaker 3: really the two of us in a pickup truck, which
Speaker 3: she drives anyway, so she was the right person to
Speaker 3: tell that story. And her accent is like that. It
Speaker 3: is that sort of soft Southern accent. So it's a
Speaker 3: little play. It's a little play that's going on there
Speaker 3: with different characters and the sometimes, like when when she's
Speaker 3: introduced with her lines hurry gets yourself inside the truck
Speaker 3: to the to the hitchhikers when it's raining, the both
Speaker 3: of us sing that line. I'm singing harmony to her,
Speaker 3: but I fade out my voice somewhere in the middle
Speaker 3: of the first sentence, so it's sort of my voice
Speaker 3: introduces this character, but it doesn't stay for the convey
Speaker 3: mention a length of time, which is a lot one
Speaker 3: line or something. It's not a usual duet form. It's
Speaker 3: a sound that comes and then disappears. That's like a
Speaker 3: lot of sounds on this record. They appear and they disappear,
Speaker 3: and then the listener says, what was that? More hopefully
Speaker 3: they say that it's meant to be the way we
Speaker 3: observe and the way we think. We don't think in
Speaker 3: four bars or eight bars. We think with no bar lines.
Speaker 3: Things come in and they go away. And that's what
Speaker 3: I was trying to do with the writing, and that
Speaker 3: song is a good example of me trying to do that.
Speaker 2: You never considered anyone but Eadie for that.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I never thought anybody else would would do that.
Speaker 2: Were you thinking of her even as you first wrote
Speaker 2: the lyrics.
Speaker 3: I think once I put the other character in there,
Speaker 3: I knew it would be it would be Edie and
Speaker 3: Edie and I. We haven't done it on record, but
Speaker 3: we've sung a lot in harmony, and like what many
Speaker 3: years ago, Edie wrote these songs when our kids were little,
Speaker 3: and she used to take them to the park and
Speaker 3: the stroller. She would make up songs while they were
Speaker 3: in the stroller on the swing, and they were great songs,
Speaker 3: really simple, great, you know the kids could sing along with,
Speaker 3: but beautiful.
Speaker 2: We did she ever record those?
Speaker 3: We recorded them, Oh you did. Yeah, so I know
Speaker 3: that we sing well together. We have a good, very
Speaker 3: good blend. So Edie was always that character. And then
Speaker 3: in Wait she also fits that another character. That voice
Speaker 3: that comes in it was like sort of angelic. And
Speaker 3: it also fits Edie's voice because it's a voice that
Speaker 3: can go a lot in a lot of places. Her
Speaker 3: natural inclination is to be a little bit bluesy, you know,
Speaker 3: she let her notes sort of fall off, and but
Speaker 3: in this case she's just singing in this voice that's
Speaker 3: I don't know who that voice is, you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: there would be the cliche would be it would be
Speaker 3: like an angel's voice, you know. I mean, I wouldn't
Speaker 3: say that, but that's cliche.
Speaker 2: Can you play any any bit of the music for
Speaker 2: Sacred Heart?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I can play a little bit of the guitar I forgot.
Speaker 3: I forgot some of it. But you know, again, this
Speaker 3: is of no interest to all but a tiny fortunate people.
Speaker 3: But this interval is an unusual interval in songs. It's
Speaker 3: for those who are musicians. It's a flat fifth or
Speaker 3: sharp fourth. That interval. You don't hear it often. The
Speaker 3: most famous example of it is.
Speaker 6: Do Marie, do do that that?
Speaker 3: That's otherwise you don't hear that too often. It's not
Speaker 3: an easy interval to sing. Naturally, A fifth is natural?
Speaker 3: Are you going this scarboroughfare? You here fifths all the time?
Speaker 2: Why did you use the unusual one here?
Speaker 3: Because it's uh, it's unusual and interesting. It's interesting too,
Speaker 3: it's interesting to the ear.
Speaker 4: But mm hmm, change of moods the summer stone. You
Speaker 4: raised the song this guy.
Speaker 5: Two happless Cittackers wire singly Nuts as we were cruising by.
Speaker 2: Why when I said that was my favorite song, you
Speaker 2: said that's my favorite song too. Why is it your
Speaker 2: favorite song?
Speaker 3: Well? I love the duet. I really liked the story.
Speaker 3: I like the way the voices come in and the
Speaker 3: way they dance with each other. I like that little interval.
Speaker 3: I liked her voice of blend of regional perfumes. I
Speaker 3: like the way the mist turns from what she says
Speaker 3: in the beginning, the rain will turn to mist with
Speaker 3: any luck, and you can find a place to stay.
Speaker 3: That's what she says to the hitchhikers when they get in,
Speaker 3: because she's like, we the drivers of the pickup feel
Speaker 3: bad that it's pouring rain. But we're really not in
Speaker 3: the mood for hitchhikers. So it's like we're come on in,
Speaker 3: but we're not going far. So we're telling you now,
Speaker 3: it's not a long ride, you know, it's the rain
Speaker 3: will stop. You can go and find a place to stay.
Speaker 3: At the end of the story, the ringing strings, the
Speaker 3: thought that God turns music into bliss, we left to
Speaker 3: pick up in the driveway the moon. The moon appeared
Speaker 3: as amber and the mist, so that the mist becomes
Speaker 3: another meaning from the first time it's used. Things like
Speaker 3: that as a songwriter are satisfying because it came together.
Speaker 3: I'm always trying to make it come together, but doesn't
Speaker 3: It doesn't happen all the time.
Speaker 2: The emotional range in that song is what I was
Speaker 2: was what you're alluding to now, is that's what drew me.
Speaker 2: We have the generosity mixed with reluctance, which is a
Speaker 2: you know, one kind of emotion. We meet these two
Speaker 2: people and they're broken, these kids, they're like on the
Speaker 2: ruts there, and then we end on this kind of
Speaker 2: with the beauty of that image of the mist. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's like this song in what I was saying, the
Speaker 2: efficient I mean efficiency is a terrible word to use here,
Speaker 2: but the idea that in a in that compact segment,
Speaker 2: you can range through these this variety of emotions and
Speaker 2: make us feel all of those things that you're going.
Speaker 3: Well, you say they're broken, they appear to be broken.
Speaker 3: You know. My boy and may wear refugees of sorts
Speaker 3: from my hometown. They're all like different there. They would
Speaker 3: have modis down, modus down, you know, like weeds. So
Speaker 3: they seem like they're broken. He doesn't talk much anymore,
Speaker 3: just to the voices in his head. But really they're
Speaker 3: seekers of spiritual bliss. You know, the sacred horror that
Speaker 3: David played to make his songs of praise. We long
Speaker 3: to hear those strings that set as hard a blaze.
Speaker 3: They're the enlightened pair. Really, it's an interesting story.
Speaker 2: I thought, Oh, it's it's it's it's gorgeous, it's it's odd.
Speaker 2: It's the one that I mean, it's someone who was
Speaker 2: raising the church. It's it's the one. It's the song.
Speaker 2: It's the most kind of explicitly biblical. It's a yeah,
Speaker 2: really you could turn that into a hymn. It could
Speaker 2: be sung in a church.
Speaker 3: I get a lot of pleasure of somebody. If that
Speaker 3: was if it did find its way into that environment,
Speaker 3: I'd like.
Speaker 2: That that would give you a lot of pleasure because
Speaker 2: they would recognize it.
Speaker 3: I like when songs go to different places. I like
Speaker 3: it when different communities of people hear something that they
Speaker 3: identify within a song. It means that you can read
Speaker 3: different things into it, and it's something that as a songwriter,
Speaker 3: you would hope to achieve that. It's that something would
Speaker 3: appeal to many, many people on a personal level, and
Speaker 3: that personal interpretation would be quite different along the spectrum
Speaker 3: of the of the listeners. That would be a successful song.
Speaker 3: And it happens naturally with every song because as I've said,
Speaker 3: as we said, and when we had our long conversation,
Speaker 3: one of the things was that I believe that the
Speaker 3: listener completes the song. They hear it, They take in
Speaker 3: the meaning on a personal level may not be the
Speaker 3: meaning that I intended. They even change the words in
Speaker 3: their mind. When people sometimes repeat the words that there
Speaker 3: are their favorite words to me of the songs, it's
Speaker 3: not what I wrote, but it's what they heard. That's
Speaker 3: what it is. That's what the listener completes the song.
Speaker 3: So if this song was sung in an environment that
Speaker 3: it was a church environment, it would have a certain
Speaker 3: a certain kind of meaning. If it was sung in
Speaker 3: a different place, it would have a different, different meaning.
Speaker 3: That's good. It's good because it does. It does have
Speaker 3: a choice of meanings.
Speaker 2: Was the production of this record different than previous records?
Speaker 2: Were you more? Was it more exhaustive?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: No, no, it was the same. It's the same. This
Speaker 3: was just a different animal, that's all. It's not exhausting anyway.
Speaker 3: It's not exhausting, and I don't get bored with doing
Speaker 3: things over and over and over again. It's not even
Speaker 3: the thought that enters my mind this is boring. It's
Speaker 3: you're searching for something that you can hear, but you haven't.
Speaker 3: I haven't attained yet, so you really get interested in
Speaker 3: the in the pursuit. It's not boring. It's not exhausting
Speaker 3: at all. It's I mean, it's really when you're hot
Speaker 3: on the trail, it's really exhilarating. And it's part of
Speaker 3: what makes me like to do this and why I've
Speaker 3: spent my whole life doing it. I really enjoy it,
Speaker 3: and when I get it right for myself, then I
Speaker 3: get a little blast of dopamine in my brain and
Speaker 3: I'm addicted. I want it again.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Paul Simon for taking us behind the making
Speaker 1: of his newest album, Seven Songs. Be sure to check
Speaker 1: out the audio original Miracle and Wonder Conversations with Paul
Speaker 1: Simon to hear more about Paul's a brilliant career. You
Speaker 1: can find it at audible dot com or at pushkin
Speaker 1: dot fm. And again, we're releasing a new version of
Speaker 1: that book, along with a brand new chapter about Seven
Speaker 1: Psalms this fall. You can hear Paul's new album Seven Psalms,
Speaker 1: along with all of our favorite songs of his on
Speaker 1: a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. You can
Speaker 1: subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash
Speaker 1: broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our
Speaker 1: new episodes. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose,
Speaker 1: Jason Gambrel, Ben Talliday, Nisha Venkat, Jordan McMillan, and Eric Sandler.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Sophie Crane. Broken Record is a production
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Speaker 1: I'm justin Richmond.