Words by Gabe Durham//Illustration by Ryan Flynn

In late April, 2005, I was standing in the back of a sweaty outdoor college graduation when I ran into a friend who’s a drummer in a rock band. He gets really enthusiastic when he talks about music, and somehow we got on the subject of Paul Simon. We shared a love for “Rhythm of the Saints,” and, of course, “Graceland,” and he asked me if I’d heard “You’re the One,” Simon’s 2000 release. For whatever reason, “You’re the One” came and went without much notice from fans or critics, myself included, but this guy was telling me it was the best thing Simon had ever done. That’s a weighty statement about a man who has made a lot of “classic” albums. There’s some “Bridge Over Troubled Water” fans who’d be downright pissed. But when I found a used copy of “You’re the One” later that summer, I got it based solely on his recommendation. So began my hot fling with the album.

“Somewhere in a burst of glory / Sound becomes a song / I’m bound to tell a story / That’s where I belong.” In these four lines opening lines on “You’re the One,” Simon establishes himself as an inevitable narrator and music as his miraculous medium.

It gets better from there. The album is full of individual gems about love, getting old, and eventually dying. In “Old,” an up-tempo “Me and Julio”-style tune, Simon is getting sick of people reminding him how old he is until he realizes that “God is old. We’re not old.”

Simon is quick to give his opinion, but happy to contradict himself. In “Darling Lorraine, he appears to slip in cliché when he begins a verse, “All my life I’ve been a wanderer,” before rethinking, “Not really, I mostly lived near my parents’ home. Anyway…” In “You’re the One,” Simon sings to his lover, “May twelve angels guard you while you sleep.” Then he adds, as if to himself, “Maybe that’s a waste of angels, I don’t know…” What seems like a lack of focus brought on by old age is just Rhymin’ Simon’s way of disarming his audience so that his punch will be all the more memorable.

In the midst of all this old guy reflection is the mischievous “Pigs, Sheep and Wolves,” an allegory that sticks it to the death penalty, media circuses and corrupt politicians, all the while sounding like he’s reading to kids.

It’s as if, as he nears the end of his life, all the man wants to write about is what matters. And for him it’s love. “Ask somebody to love you / Takes a lot of nerve,” he admits on “Look At That.” Then there’s the song, “Love,” about desperate longing: “Makes you want to laugh out loud when you receive it,” Simon sings, “And gobble it like candy.” “Darling Lorraine” is a detailed story of the ups and downs of a rocky marital relationship in which the twist is that the couple actually stays together. But his greatest insight is on the reasons we don’t stay together.

Nothing on “You’re the One,” or “Graceland” or “Rhythm of the Saints,” or anything else Simon has ever done gets me like the song, “You’re the One.” Musically, it’s got everything—an inexhaustible guitar hook, a rich percussion section, an unpredictable structure (a soft, floating bridge forestalls the first chorus but no other), and vocals that range from off-the-cuff talking to a soft croon. But it’s the lyrics that make it a classic. “Nature gives us shapeless shapes / Clouds and waves and flame,” Simon sings, “But human expectation is that love remains the same / And when it doesn’t, we point our fingers and blame, blame, blame.” That lyric hangs in my mind like an emergency exit. It both comforts me about the inevitability of heartbreak and warns me about my own dark potential to find fault in everyone but myself. Especially romantically. As Simon concludes in the song’s final seconds, “We’re the ones.” We’re both to blame.
The album ends with “Quiet,” Simon’s acknowledgement that he’s going to die someday, but his vision of death is so peaceful (“a time of solitude / Of peace without illusions”) that it sounds almost bearable. And right when you think he’s just going out in a whisper, he offers one last piece of sage wisdom: “With the hunger of ambition / For the change inside the purse / They are handcuffs on the soul, my friends / Handcuffs on the soul / And worse.” Then he fades out with a sensory vision of Heaven as unblemished nature.
It may be his preachiest album, but Paul Simon’s sermons of generosity, tact, humility, and understanding are backed by so much authority that we’ve got to take him at his word. It’d be the perfect way to end a career of melancholy wisdom, so I assumed it was the end.

Now it’s almost six years after “You’re the One” and “Surprise!”—a new album. Hell yes, I’m surprised. I have devoured review after review that said, “Finally! Another good Paul Simon album!” as if we’ve been waiting for something like this since 1984.

As I write this, I’ve just picked up “Surprise” at Circuit City for $15, a price I normally refuse to pay for a CD unless it comes with a bonus DVD or a microwave or something. But I’m so curious: What could Paul Simon possibly have left to say?

I started to listen to it. It’s fun, it’s electronic, it sounds a little like David Gray’s “A New Day At Midnight.” But I just can’t really dig into it until I go on the record, praising his masterpiece.

Be surprised that a new Paul Simon record exists, but if you’re surprised that it’s good, you haven’t been paying attention.