100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 The Boy in the Bubble

02 Graceland

03 I Know What I Know

04 Gumboots

05 Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

06 You Can Call Me Al

07 Under African Skies

08 Homeless

09 Crazy Love, Vol. II

10 That Was Your Mother

11 All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints

‘Graceland’, the title track of Paul Simon’s masterpiece, is the tale of three journeys. First, it’s a trip that Simon and his son Harper took to Elvis Presley’s mansion in Memphis, Tennessee after the break-up of his marriage to actress Carrie Fisher. The tune is roughly in a South African genre known as ‘township jive’ and it marks the journey that Simon made to Johannesberg to play with African musicians. That South African trip then propelled Simon on a journey of rediscovery into music.

In 1985 Simon was given a tape that included the Boyoyo Boys’ instrumental ‘Gumboota’, which piqued his interest in African music. (‘Gumboots’ on Graceland became a version of that song.)

At the time Simon was in the doldrums. His last album was a commercial and artistic flop. Like many of his contemporaries, he was a middle-aged guy in a young man’s game and he struggled to find a way to write rock & roll songs for grown-ups.

‘Musicians have tried to stay adolescent and naturally this has made them look ridiculous,’ Simon said. ‘You don’t get this obsession with age in blues or jazz, or any other art form. You don’t lose your rage as you grow older; it can deepen. Or you can acquire peace of mind – either way, let’s hear what’s on people’s minds, but let’s not have everybody speak as if they were children.’

In South Africa Simon met a bunch of inspiring, untainted musicians, including Joseph Shabalala and his group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. ‘I became bewitched by Ladysmith Black Mambazo because they were so beautiful [sounding],’ Simon recalled. ‘They were so good at what they did. I was totally intimidated.’ Simon wrote ‘Homeless’ in the Ladysmith style and flew them all to London where the track was recorded. They also contributed to the coda of ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’.

‘The Boy in the Bubble’ opens the album with a Sotha feel (Sotha being one of the genres popular in South Africa). It’s a laundry list of miracles and wonders as Simon looks at the modern world of organ transplants and high speed communication and satellites. Rather than the bleak, alienated world of ‘The Sounds of Silence’, this is a world of noise, full of vanities and buffoons, but one of beauty.

Simon’s lyrical gifts came back to him strongly on this album. He has said ‘Graceland’ was the best song he has ever written and it would be hard to disagree. Lines like ‘Losing love is like a window in your heart’ is a devastating summation of the end of an affair. The song struggles with big issues – fatherhood, love and the ineffable – and finds solace and grace in there somewhere. Another song about his marriage, ‘You Can Call Me Al’, is a more humorous, if oblique, look at the same issues – the desperate search for love and the confusion that we feel trying to understand our place in the universe. ‘Al’, with its surreal imagery, also reflects his African experience – the imagery of the township songs and his own feeling of dislocation at being in an alien land.

On returning to the US Simon looked at his own roots, hooking up with Latino rockers Los Lobos for ‘All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints’ and also the Everly Brothers. Simon went on the trip to Graceland as a man who had nothing to lose and on the way he found it all.