FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All These Years
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RELEASED forty-five years ago…
this month, I wanted to put Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years into Vinyl Corner. I love so many of Paul Simon’s albums, but I think Still Crazy After All These Years is one of my favourites – though nothing can defeat the mighty Graceland of 1986! Still Crazy After All These Years won two Grammy Awards for Album of the Year, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance in 1976, and it contains two of Simon’s best-ever songs: 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, and Still Crazy After All These Years. My Little Town reunited Simon with former partner Art Garfunkel for the first time since 1970, while Gone at Last was a duet between Simon and Phoebe Snow. I think Still Crazy After All These Years was the last classic Simon album before there was a little dip with 1980’s One-Tricky Pony. His 1972 eponymous album, and 1973’s There Goes Rhymin' Simon showed he was just as strong solo as he was with Art Garfunkel; Still Crazy After All These Years boasts some of his best songwriting. Even though Simon was only in his thirties when he wrote the songs on Still Crazy After All These Years, you get the sense of a somewhat aged and more contemplative songwriter; someone who was, perhaps, feeling a little bit of strain and the years getting to him. Not that this affects the material. Instead, I think Simon’s voice is at its richest and most nuanced, and the material is incredible!
Go and buy the album on vinyl if you can, as it makes for a wonderful listening experience. I am going to bring in a review for Still Crazy After All These Years, but I wanted to concentrate on the title track for a moment. American Songwriter wrote a feature on Still Crazy After All These Years earlier this year - and there was some reflection from Simon himself:
“Sometimes, as Simon reveals, the process can be uncomfortable, as the songwriter is forced to confront aspects of his own life he’d rather avoid altogether. But in the service of the song, such sacrifices get made.
The title of the song, as Simon explains, is one that came to him out of nowhere. He did recognize it was song-worthy. But he wasn’t crazy about what “Still Crazy” told him about himself. Nor was he crazy enough to throw it out, and use something less personal.
The music for the verses, as he shows, came from the chords he played on guitar, all of which were informed and expanded by his study of jazz, as he discusses.
But the music for the bridge was a whole other thing, as it was built on all the notes of the twelve-tone scale he hadn’t yet used, so as to give it a musical freshness. It was a “mathematical game,” as James Taylor called it, but one which worked.
“Oh yes,” James said, “That worked! “
Other peers of Simon also expressed admiration and some incredulity at this and similar methods employed by Paul. ” Simon’s tough, ” said Randy Newman. “You can hear how hard he works, like the changes in ‘Still Crazy.’”
Those changes distinguish it from almost all his other songs, which are all rooted in one key center.
“Still Crazy,” however, veers back and forth between A major and G major from the introduction to the ending. This was not, as Simon said, the original concept. But after writing the bridge, which leapt a whole step from G major to A before returning to G, and loving the subtle but vivid lift it gave the melody, he decided to start the introduction also in A major, leading back to G for the first verse.
PAUL SIMON: It’s very helpful to start with something that’s true; if you start with something that’s false, you’re always covering your tracks. Something simple and true that has a lot of possibilities is a nice way to begin.
Sometimes there are second verses, and I say,”Oh, that’s really not a second verse; it’s a first verse. In “Still Crazy After All These Years,” that title phrase came to me first and it didn’t come with melody either. It just came as a line, and then I had to create a story.
I remember well coming up with the first line of the song. I was stepping into a shower when the thought came to me, and I wasn’t very happy about it either. I didn’t say, “Oh, that’s clever, that’s a good one, I can use that.” It was, at the time, an assessment of where I was at in terms of my life. And I wasn’t very happy that that was my assessment, but I soon turned it into a song.
And that’s what you do with those things, and that makes it something else. In fact, now it has almost no relevance on a personal level to me. That was a long time ago. I’ve long since stopped feeling that way. I probably wouldn’t describe myself that way. I probably wouldn’t think that way at all”.
I have been listening back to Still Crazy After All These Years a lot on its forty-fifth anniversary and seeing where Paul Simon headed after that album. He reached a new peak on Graceland and continued putting out phenomenal albums until his final studio album, In the Blue Light, in 2018. I think Still Crazy After All These Years is among his top-five solo efforts, and it is an album that everyone needs to hear. This is what AllMusic said when they reviewed the album:
“The third new studio album of Paul Simon's post-Simon & Garfunkel career was a musical and lyrical change of pace from his first two, Paul Simon and There Goes Rhymin' Simon. Where Simon had taken an eclectic approach before, delving into a variety of musical styles and recording all over the world, Still Crazy found him working for the most part with a group of jazz-pop New York session players, though he did do a couple of tracks ("My Little Town" and "Still Crazy After All These Years") with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section that had appeared on Rhymin' Simon and another ("Gone at Last") returned to the gospel style of earlier songs like "Loves Me Like a Rock."
Of course, "My Little Town" also marked a return to working with Art Garfunkel, and another Top Ten entry for S&G. But the overall feel of Still Crazy was of a jazzy style subtly augmented with strings and horns. Perhaps more striking, however, was Simon's lyrical approach. Where Rhymin' Simon was the work of a confident family man, Still Crazy came off as a post-divorce album, its songs reeking of smug self-satisfaction and romantic disillusionment. At their best, such sentiments were undercut by humor and made palatable by musical hooks, as on "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," which became the biggest solo hit of Simon's career. But elsewhere, as on "Have a Good Time," the singer's cynicism seemed unearned. Still, as out of sorts as Simon may have been, he was never more in tune with his audience: Still Crazy topped the charts, spawned four Top 40 hits, and won Grammys for Song of the Year and Best Vocal Performance”.
I do hope we have not heard the last of Paul Simon regarding recorded material, but I think he is pretty keen to retire and he has definitely given us more than we deserve! I wanted to nod to a magnificent album that showcases Paul Simon at his very best. Aside from the bigger numbers like Still Crazy After All These Years, and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, there are so many other gems to be found – including Have a Good Time, and Silent Eyes. Make sure you go and check out the incredible Still Crazy After All These Years from one of…
THE true masters of music.