For one of the 70s’ touchstone albums, Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years is a rather low-key affair. It runs for just ten songs and under 40 minutes and every song has a similar laid-back vibe.
Even the album’s #1 hit, ’50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,’ drifts by on a silky, mellow groove. This is an album made for a lazy Sunday morning.
In 1975, Paul Simon released his fourth solo album, the sublime Still Crazy After All These Years.
The record won him his second of three Album of the Year Grammys (the first went to Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water). Accepting the award, Simon thanked Stevie Wonder for not releasing an album that year, as Wonder had won the award the previous two years (and would go on to win it again the following year).
If you put a gun to my head and asked me to name the best song on Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, I would first wonder why somebody would do something quite so perverse. Then I’d pick ‘American Tune.’
But coming in a very close second would be ‘Something So Right,’ one of those songs that feels like it must have been written in the 40s by Cole Porter or some other urbane songwriting genius. It’s another modern standard, a feat Simon has pulled off again and again.
Paul Simon’s self-titled solo album was a bit of an oddity in that it didn’t carry over the style of the songs he wrote for Simon & Garfunkel but neither did it feel like the great material that was still to come.
His next album, released a year later in 1973, feels a lot more like a true Paul Simon record. There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, despite its goofy title, is Simon’s first great solo album.
Paul Simon’s self-titled album isn’t exactly packed with hits or songs well-known to the casual fan. Its one classic Simon track is ‘Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard‘ (though that song is so great that, really, what else do you need?).
The rest of the album contains songs that I know only casually — the jazzy ‘Hobo’s Blues,’ the soft-as-a-whisper ‘Everything Put Together Falls Apart’ and the bluesy ‘Congratulations,’ which hinted at Simon’s looming divorce from first wife Peggy.
Meet Me In Montauk 