Paul Simon explains how musical evolution resulted in his most complex song
“If the song is beautiful, then it lasts,” Paul Simon once said, delving into the ways in which simplicity and complexity intertwine. Sometimes, artists only possess one of those two qualities, but it doesn’t matter – if it resonates, then it works. Simon’s skillset may have evolved over time, but what music means to him remained largely the same.
Whenever someone takes up guitar lessons, there’s a reason why they are almost always immediately handed a The Beatles songbook. The chord progressions are easy to pick up, and they introduce the player to the fundamentals of acoustic rock. However, while this can be said for The Beatles’ earlier material, their evolving sound revolutionised the ways that music incorporated innovation.
According to Simon, this transformation demonstrated more about The Beatles’ inherent ability to craft beauty than their technical prowess. Even in the latter years, they sometimes revived an element of their signature simplicity for no reason other than it felt right for that particular song. Although Simon views his music as adopting a similar trajectory, there’s no right or wrong so long as it feels authentic.
As musicians’ art matures and becomes more accomplished, there’s often a natural inclination towards more classical music tendencies. Much of the heavy rock music that came later seems to borrow from a subset of classical musical sensibilities, which speaks volumes about the ways in which complexities sometimes equate to classical emulation.
In Simon’s case, while some of his earlier work is widely considered his best, like ‘The Sound of Silence’, later compositions like ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’ and ‘American Tune’ saw the musician exercising his more classically-inclined muscles. ‘American Tune’, in particular, became his most complex song as it incorporated the influence of Bach and instruments like the viol, resulting in an intricate web of “chord changes on virtually every note.”
The subconscious musical influences often become one with the natural generation of ideas, which Simon explains is an inherent part of musical creativity. Describing the moment an idea came to him in a dream, he says there have been a number of occasions where these “just simply come through me”. As he immerses in preferred musical styles, it seems his dreamlike state delivers messages based on these elements, which he takes and creates a song out of.
In this way, whether music naturally becomes more complex or remains simplistic, the only thing that remains important is the truth behind it all. In Simon’s words, it must be as natural as possible, as that’s when the real artistry shines through. “All you have to do is just make sure it doesn’t get messed up as it passes through you,” said the musician.