Paul Simon: The Paul Simon Songbook - 1965
Paul Simon is a truly wonderful songwriter, as his time with Simon & Garfunkel showed, and it continued throughout his solo career which has now been over four times as long as the partnership with Garfunkel. He has a fetching mellifluous voice and a mastery of subtle and sensitive lyricism that go together so well.
I first heard his solo work in the early seventies with the reggae-influenced Me And Julio Down At The Schoolyard and Mother And Child Reunion but it was the New Orleans jazz of Take Me To The Mardi Gras that really confirmed me as a fan. I can still remember listening to it on a tiny transistor radio in the kitchen in my childhood home, and thinking "wow, what a great record...". I loved the atmosphere on it, and the way Simon's gentle voice just sort of you invited you in.
The world music adventures of the mid-eighties were a superb renaissance after a quiet period and his career his continued giving us quality ever since. He is genuinely one of music's finest singer-songwriters. I challenge anyone to listen to any Paul Simon album and not get something out of it, at some point.
Anyway - now to those tentative solo sixties days.....
Released six years before what is considered by many to be his first "proper" solo album (because it came after Simon & Garfunkel's split, I guess) came this interesting collection of songs.
Anglophile Simon recorded the album in London - whose coffeehouses he was performing at regularly, - indeed he is pictured on the cover in London with girlfriend and muse Kathy. It is a sparse, acoustic creation, and, to be perfectly honest, sounds just like an S & G album without Art's accompanying voice.
Simon's solo version of Sound Of Silence is the obvious highlight, as is the catchy I Am A Rock, a song which would become a longtime Simon favourite. Also notable is an amusing Bob Dylan spoof in A Simple Desultory Philippic in which Simon, sounding almost exactly like 1962-63 era Bob, sends up songs like Talking World War III Blues. Kathy's Song is a gentle gem too, and Simon's contemporary political awareness is expressed on A Church Is Burning and He was My Brother which were no doubt inspired by the racist atrocities perpetrated in America's Deep South as well as Simon's college classmate who was murdered by Southern racists.
