Paul Simon: Rhymin' Simon

Fifty years ago this year Paul Simon first met Art Garfunkel at Forest Hills High School in Queens, New York. Simon went on to become one of the greatest singer-songwriters in the world. But, as he tells Alec Wilkinson, the task of creating new lyrics and melodies remains as tough as ever

In Spring 2001, shortly before Paul Simon began rehearsing his band for a tour of Europe, he wrote three fragments of music – the first to occur to him in a year and a half. It was as long a dry period as he had ever been through. I went one night to a baseball game with him, and, going home in his car, he said: "The melodies have started to come. It's a relief."

Songwriters sometimes describe the sensation of songs arriving nearly intact. Simon has had this experience, but not often. His talent is more patient and painstaking than ecstatic. Songwriting, he says, is "trial and error repeated almost endlessly". A song usually takes him three months to finish. Typically, when he concludes a body of work, he thinks that he has depleted his resources, and that they won't be replenished. "I always feel that the situation is serious," he said in the car. "I'm in a vacuum, it's a dearth, and then there's something – a few notes, a phrase – and I say, 'I guess there's something,' but it's so small that I don't even know whether to count it."

Simon regards writing songs as the effort to find form for sounds he hears in his head. "Maybe 10, 15 years ago I realised that what I was fascinated with, couldn't explain, was sound – that you can't really say why a combination of sounds is moving or feels really good and right – and the whole game was, 'Can I get the sounds in my head on tape?' " His driver brought the car to a stop at a light. Simon looked out of the window. "I should get ready to work," he said softly. "You go into training – you play more, think more, listen more – instead of fretting over why you're not hearing the melodies."

Four years ago Simon had five songs underway when he put them aside to prepare for a tour with Bob Dylan. Several months passed, the tour was over. Visiting a friend in New Mexico, he listened to recordings of the songs – he hadn't yet written any words – and was very pleased. Then he realised that he no longer felt any vestige of the impulse that had supplied them.

"I thought they had come from an inspired place," he said, "and I was just furious with myself for interrupting the work. What a fool I'd been, I thought, because I had just arrogantly assumed that the inspiration would return when I wanted it to. Then I thought, God, I have to get the rest. Because five tracks is only half an album. But what if the point was: this was a level of joy in creating that you always hoped to attain. You think the experience involves 10 because you need 10 for the marketplace. Maybe you should just appreciate the experience, maybe that was the point, and there won't be any more." He sighed. "Anyway, another couple of months went by. I just had to wait."

The feeling of joy eventually returned. Many of the lyrics, uncharacteristically, came to him so quickly that he felt as if he were "taking dictation". After he had recorded the songs (on You're the One, his latest CD, released in 2000), he took the tapes to Los Angeles and played them for the executives at his record company. "They were nice, respectful – it's a great honour and so on – but they didn't actually understand," he said. "Or at least I thought they didn't understand. That record was hypnotic, in its way, and they were thinking more about 'speed and impact'."

On his way home, Simon stopped at his friend's house in New Mexico, and while he was there the company's response began to unsettle him. "I thought: Why am I so desperately wanting to enter the marketplace? And then I said to myself, 'You made this thing that you received f partly as a gift, and you took it immediately to the marketplace without sufficiently appreciating it. And when you intuited that the marketplace wasn't going to accept it you knew right away that you had no business taking such a thing there. The gift was the point.'"

Several weeks went by before something in him relaxed, and he thought: "You exaggerate. You were born with a talent and you worked hard at it, and the result gave people a lot of pleasure, and no matter what you did that was wrong, you can't throw that out. You didn't do it to give people pleasure. You did it to see if you could make the sounds in your imagination come out on tape."

This insight was followed, even so, by the year and a half of drought, during which Simon couldn't listen to anyone's music, especially his own, and he felt that he might not write any songs again.

SIMON IS less nomadic than musicians often are. What keeps him mostly at home is his wife, the singer Edie Brickell, who is from Texas, and their three young children. Nevertheless, he travels frequently. On a trip to Memphis to meet Joseph Shabalala, the leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the Zulu group that appears on the 1986 album Graceland, I went along too. Shabalala wants to build a museum devoted to South African music, especially the kind he heard as a child on a farm (he is now 60). Ladysmith Black Mambazo were performing near Memphis and Simon thought that visiting the Delta Blues Museum, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, about an hour and a half south of the city, might suggest to Shabalala a plan. Simon also wanted to visit a health clinic in Clarksdale to which he gives a lot of money through the Children's Health Fund in New York, a charity he started with his friend Dr Irwin Redlener.

It is raining when Simon and I leave New Jersey in a small jet he has rented. When we get to Memphis, one of those Jeep-like cars that make you feel as if you're seeing everything from the perspective of a man on horseback has been delivered to the terminal for us, and Simon drives.

When we get to our hotel, Shabalala is sitting in the lobby, at a table by a fountain. He is drinking tea. He is a small, sturdily built man, with a round, open face. He and Simon hug each other, then the three of us go out and get in the car. Shabalala has brought a tape of South African women singing traditional lama music, without accompaniment. For several of the songs, he had written parts for Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose 10 members are men.

The first song, a hymn, is sung in Zulu. Instead of progressing in the stately manner of a Protestant hymn, it advances like a spiritual, with hesitations in the phrasing and silences between the verses. Six or eight women take part. Their voices are pure and unadorned, and the singing is deeply felt. The men's voices enter unexpectedly after what I take to be the first verse, answering the women's, and the contrast between the two registers and textures is thrilling. "I don't know what l can do with it," Shabalala says. "I hope I can do something. I'm still working on it."

We pass shabby little shopping malls, pawnshops, a burial ground next to a junkyard, the Crystal Palace roller-skating rink, and then, as if a piece of stage scenery had been pulled into the wings, we are driving among crop rows that run on either side of us to the horizon. The road is so straight that it seems to have been taped on to the fields. The next song is a work song, Shabalala says. Along with the singers, he whistles sharply now and then, like a man calling cattle. "I never heard you do that," Simon tells him. "It's a good sound for you."

We arrive at the museum – a warehouse beside some railroad tracks – around lunchtime. The director, Tony Czech, leads us past glass cabinets with guitars and photographs, walls with displays of records, and a room that contains the shack in which Muddy Waters was born. Simon is often regarded uncharitably by musicians who don't know him. They think that to make Graceland he went to South Africa, bought some records, came home and wrote lyrics, cheated the South African musicians out of royalties, paid up only when called to account, and finally walked into the sunset with boxcars of cash. I want to know what Shabalala thinks, so, at a moment when Czech has Simon's attention, I ask Shabalala when he and Simon had first met.

"Paul came to South Africa in 1985," he says. "I was on tour. When I called home, my wife tell me that Paul Simon want to talk to me. 'Are you kidding?' I say. 'How can I go to New York? He's a New York guy.' She say, 'No, he's in Johannesburg. He's waiting for you.' But I was in doubt. How does he know me? So I take a car to Johannesburg and somebody lead me to the studio, and I find many people waiting and Paul leading an audition.

"When I come in, he stop everything, and he say, 'Joseph, I hear that you are on tour. I'm Paul Simon.' And I think, 'Is this him? There are people supposed to talk to Paul, but not me.' He say, 'I love to work with you. I am a fan of Ladysmith Black Mambazo,' and the way he say it, it was like music, like he was singing it. I discovered in his eyes this man is full of music. And I say, 'To work together, what is it about? Are there songs?' And he say 'Yes'. I say that we should work together, but I didn't know how. 'Are we going to blend together? The accent is so different.' "

On Graceland, the song "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" begins with Ladysmith Black Mambazo's voices. I ask whose idea that had been. "Paul ask me, 'Joseph, can you please bless this song?" ' Shabalala says. "He play it for me, and I listen and said, 'This song is OK.' He say, 'I still need your blessing,' so I write five lines in Zulu." I ask what they mean in English. "He sing, 'She's a rich girl, she don't try to hide it, diamonds on the soles of her shoes.' So I answer what he said. 'It's not usually so,' I say, 'but now we see girls that can afford to maintain themselves.' "

Tony Czech brings us to a stop in front of a glass cabinet that has in it a National steel guitar – a guitar, that is, with a body made of steel. He opens the case and takes the guitar out and hands it to Simon. Simon balances the guitar on his raised knee and plays a couple of simple blues figures, the way any kid in a guitar store would, and then he moves his hand high up on the neck and plays a descending line, a succinct, self-contained remark. He gives the guitar back and has his picture taken with Czech and the cashier at the gift shop, then he buys some CDs – among them one by the blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson, because Shabalala has never heard him.

The next morning, Simon and I fly home through turbulence, and neither of us feel very well when we land. f

As his driver is taking us back to the city, I ask about some lines in "Darling Lorraine", a song on You're the One in which a man and a woman meet, court, marry, squabble, make up, and then the woman falls sick and dies. The narrator, whose manner is evasive, is named Frank. "All my life I've been a wanderer," he sings. Then, "Not really, I mostly lived near my parents' home." Describing Lorraine's death late one night in hospital, Simon sings, "All the trees were washed with April rain/and the moon in the meadow took darling Lorraine." The lines are the song's emotional peak, and so mysterious and poetic that I wonder how they had occurred to him.

"It could have been the heavens, I guess, but I used the moon," he says. "My apartment's across from the Sheep Meadow, in Central Park, so that's there. 'Trees being washed', a ritual of death – washing the deceased – but because it's April it gives you a feeling of the sadness. 'April is the cruellest month' sadness. It wasn't winter trees – it was the moon in the meadow that had a kind of hopefulness to it that seemed to work."

A few years ago, Simon was on the Oprah Winfrey show to promote his Broadway musical, The Capeman, and Winfrey tried to coax him into saying that he regarded himself as a genius. (She failed.) I ask if the exchange had felt awkward. "I never thought of myself as an artist until I was in my forties," he says, "and then it was only as a personality type. I thought I was a bright guy, real smart. I could figure stuff out. I was good at things. That's what I thought, but there were periods when I couldn't explain what I wrote. I don't think I'm special, and I never did – I didn't think, I'm 21 and I've written 'The Sound of Silence'. When I wrote 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', I thought, 'That's better than I usually write.' As decades go by, you're grateful for the talent you have, but there's a time when you just put away your feelings and work. Whoever is sitting at the top of the heap, that's a genius," he says disdainfully. "Anyway, I wasn't ever sitting at the top."

He shrugs. "Actually, these observations form an internal dialogue of very little consequence, because you're going to do what you're going to do anyway. The question I have, though, is when you can create something as complicated rhythmically and thematically as 'Darling Lorraine', how do you measure the quality, especially since the earlier work was enormously popular? I can still put together 'Darling Lorraine' or 'You're the One'. It won't mean as much as 'Graceland' or 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'. Those songs had an effect on people's lives. 'Mrs Robinson' or 'Still Crazy After All These Years', or '50 Ways': they're in the culture. If the work isn't part of the popular culture, is it as meaningful? Even though there are examples of posthumous recognition, for the most part a song's a hit or it's gone."

ABOUT A WEEK after Simon gets back from London, and shortly before the rehearsals begin, I meet him at his office in Times Square, where he plays a CD he has made of the two fragments he has written – he hasn't yet written the third. One of the tracks is a slow shuffle, the descending line he had played at the museum, and the other is a briskly rising arpeggiated figure, a series of simple chords – guitar practice pattern that he has adapted. The playing is skilful and intricate, and I ask why, when he performs, he lets other guitarists play the more complicated parts? "I can't play and sing," he says. While I sit and listen to the shuffle, Simon stands behind me and sings nonsense syllables and every once in a while adds a line. "Hell, yeah, I'm angry at myself, can't blame no one else, so I'm angry at myself" is the only one I hear clearly.

After a few minutes, he turns off the CD and sits down. "That's the beginning," he says. Then he asks: "Do you mind if I play the guitar? I feel more comfortable with a guitar in my hands." From a closet, he gets one and sits down and again plays the figure he had played at the museum. "It could go a lot of ways," he says. "If I added a blues harp, it would sound blues. I could add an acoustic bass. My son Harper [from his first marriage, who plays guitar in a rock'n'roll band] thought it might sound good without a bass at all – a guitar record, which I haven't made in years."

He puts the guitar down. "A lot of it anyhow is just slogging away," he says. "The first tracks, when I came out of the studio, I was ambivalent. I went through, first, denial – I don't think it's good, but maybe it's good and people will like it. Then I get to, I don't care what people think, it's no good. I have to find somebody to help me fix it, because I don't know what to do." He leans forward and put his elbows on his knees. "I was thinking, I don't know who's going to help," he says, "and when I get over being annoyed I'll take out everything that I don't like, then I'll revise it. I worked with Vincent Nguini, the guitar player in my band, and Steve Gadd, the drummer, and we fixed the guitar part and the drums, and now it's right."

I ask if I can hear the songs once more, and he says sure. "Do you like it with the singing, or no singing?" he asks. I say I like the singing. He turns the CD back on and begins to sing quietly. From the corner of my eye, I watch him dancing, with his feet in place and his arms and shoulders moving in an angular way, as if he is a figure in a hieroglyph.

Simon is the size of a jockey, except that instead of being wiry he is barrel-chested and muscular. His hands are small and thick; they look like paws. His expression is habitually solemn, and it always has been. When he went as a child to buy comic books, people would say: "What's the matter?" and he always thought, "Why do they ask me that?" His gestures are minimal and understated, and so is his manner.

His sentences trail off and are completed by a slight extension of the chin, a mild widening of the eyes, a delicate shrug. His band members know that the remarks "Don't think so" or "Yeah, but ..." delivered with no special inflection, amount to an emphatic dismissal. The extravagant subtlety of his manner and movements must once have been a refinement, an awareness that a small man making flamboyant gestures or talking too loudly might look comical.

He has never been very comfortable with his appearance. A friend of his told me that he won't look at a photograph of himself. When I ask Simon if this is true, he says: "Yeah." Then he adds: "Actually, it's better if you do look, because then you can do something about it."

He prefers reading poetry – especially Blake, Yeats, and John Neihardt – to fiction. Fiction writers "are in the world of the imagination," he says, "and I'm in the world of the imagination, so it's too much." He also likes to read "science for the layman, because I was never any good at science, and I'm curious about it now". Growing up, he was a good baseball player, and is surprised that even though he no longer takes part in the sport he sometimes dreams that he can hit major-league pitching, or that he is standing in the outfield and can't pick up his feet. "It can go either way," he says. Fifteen or 20 years ago, he realised that he could recall nearly every piece of music he had heard as a child, and that some of it had found its way into his songs, however obscurely. John Lennon once told him that the BBC didn't play rock'n'roll when he was young, but Radio Caroline, the pirate station in the English Channel, did. "It was so far away," Simon tells me, "that the signal would come and go, and the texture of it was something he said he always tried to get into his records." The rhythms of Elvis Presley's versions of "Mystery Train" turn up again and again in his own writing, he says, each time differently.

As a singer, Simon is an adept and imaginative phraser, an ability he developed to compensate, he says, "for not having a big voice". What limits most songwriters' melodies, he believes, is the reach of their voices, so he takes singing lessons to extend his range. He says that he knows intuitively when a melody is right, but that he is less confident of his lyrics, which he sometimes asks friends to review. Among his contemporaries in popular music, perhaps only Paul McCartney is his peer as a writer of melodies, just as Bob Dylan and, maybe, James Taylor are his only peers as a lyricist.

Dylan used Nashville-style country music to present a startling version of himself in the same way that Simon later made use of South African music. As a younger man, Simon sometimes felt overshadowed by Dylan's larger reputation. Dylan's hobo persona, his subversive quality, and his contempt for authority were charismatic. A lot of people made fun of his voice, but nearly everyone agreed that the songs were compelling. Next to him, Simon and Garfunkel seemed polite, studious and eager to please – college boys. The best of their music was pretty to listen to and sometimes, as with "Bridge Over Troubled Water", had emotional force. Dylan's songs made a person feel powerful. Since Graceland though, comparisons between Simon and Dylan no longer sensibly apply or take into proper account the distinctive merits of two maverick artists.

Simon's close friend Lorne Michaels, who has known him for 30 years, told me: "Since I met Paul, he's been saying that he's getting out of showbusiness." When I ask Simon if that is so, he says: "I always ask myself when I start something, 'Is this what you want to do?' I recorded when I was 15 or 16, and the record was a hit. So I was in showbusiness. I was in the world of records at a very young age. I was already becoming what I am. Basically, what I'm doing is an idea conceived by a 13-year-old. And I often think, 'You can review that idea, because it was a 13-year-old who thought it up.' And I do review it, but I still like it." E

© Alec Wilkinson 2002. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in 'The New Yorker'.