Today is Paul Simon’s birthday—80 years old. Last week, I published this piece in The Bulwark, arguing that Simon is the foremost musical storyteller of American culture. (Yes, more so than Bob Dylan.) The genesis of that piece, well, is almost like the genesis of one of Paul Simon’s songs, which often sound like they came together through a lot of observation and perceptiveness, out of lots of idiosyncratic pieces.

One of the first nights after my wife and I had moved into our new condo in Reston, Virginia, back in 2017, we had dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Fairfax. They were playing instrumental background music, which is kind of a throwback—most stores and offices these days just stream radio. One of the tracks on their relatively short, looping playlist was “The Sound of Silence.” I didn’t even remember it correctly—I called it a Beatles song! (I’ve never been that much of a music listener, funny enough.) But four years in, I still think of my wife and our new home when I hear that tune.

I opened the Bulwark essay with two similar anecdotes:

It was early morning in a church auditorium somewhere in Minneapolis, 2013. I was there representing a college club at an annual conference, and due to catch a bus back to the airport at 4 a.m. Some of the other attendees, probably also staying awake because of their rides, were playing on a guitar and singing. Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” with its cryptic reference to a “radical priest,” was the perfect song for a slap-happy bunch of college students to sing in a church auditorium at 3 a.m. It might even have been a Wednesday morning.

A few months ago I was at my hairdresser’s. She’s a lovely woman from Vietnam whose family owns and staffs her barbershop. “The Sound of Silence” came on the radio, and she hummed along to it as though it were deeply familiar to her. More than a half-century after its release, this Simon & Garfunkel tune is a recognizable piece, and perhaps a cherished piece, of American culture for this immigrant woman.

The title and chorus for “Mother and Child Reunion” came from a dish on a Chinese restaurant menu featuring both chicken and egg. For Paul Simon, that became a song. “Kodachrome” ended up on a record because it was a more original rhyme for the song’s working title, “Goin’ Home.”

That kind of creative process resonates with me. I never really know where my next idea is going to come from. It might be from walking around a store or supermarket, trying a new restaurant, driving or road tripping, something I see on the internet—ideas just kind of take shape as I take in raw material. Sometimes I build an article around a little turn of phrase that I like, other times around a photo. Anything, really.

One thing that’s appealing about Paul Simon is that unlike a lot of musicians who make socially or politically conscious art, Simon has pretty much always eschewed partisan politics. (Unlike, say, Bruce Springsteen.) It’s rare for someone to be able to talk meaningfully about politics or current events without sounding like a liberal or a conservative, or falling into hackneyed language or figures of speech.

But look at Simon’s angsty ’60s songs, which articulated the nation’s mood really perceptively, but didn’t exactly align with the counterculture. And look at this 2016 interview, in which Simon—who emphatically did not support Trump—spoke thoughtfully about, anger, inequality, and the appeal of the loudmouthed, seemingly straight-talking outsider politician.

In the original piece, I emphasize just how long a stretch of American history Simon has been around for, and professionally active during. E.g.:

“The Boxer,” released in 1969…describes a liminal New York City in almost mythical language. Consider that Paul Simon was born only 30 years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and that “The Boxer” was released only 24 years before the election of Rudy Giuliani. The Big Apple had already begun to enter the long urban slump, yet its industrial Ellis Island period had barely ended.

The fact that so many of Simon’s influences are ordinary, everyday bits of culture and commerce—the fading popularity of informal boxing (I think of Three Stooges shorts which centered around urban boxing matches); menu items; neon signs; etc.—make his songs compendiums of lots of particular moments in our history. They really deserve to be listened to and read carefully, and they will for a long time to come.

Happy birthday, Paul Simon!

Photo credit Steven Miller/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Related Reading:

When American Record Companies Hated Japan (The Bulwark)

Station Wagons and Affluence

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