(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 15 May 2025 17:30, UK
What makes a truly great song? Is it the ability to sing along and indulge in the experience of it? Does it have to be experimental and out there to be good enough? Does it need to be timeless and enduring, or can greatness come in a blinding flash and then somewhat leave? These are questions that musician Paul Simon has naturally contemplated, both of his own music and the music of others, including The Beatles.
Like seemingly everyone working at the time, Simon was in awe of the Beatles. It would be hard not to be. Even if the music wasn’t really a person’s thing, or if they didn’t love the band members as peers or people, it would be impossible to deny how inspiring their output was. Each year, there was a new album, sometimes even more, and each new album was a whole new era that dared every other working act to level up too.
Simon definitely felt that. He admired the band’s work but had a complex connection with them as people. Lennon once dubbed him a “singing dwarf”, and the two then had a brief war of words. However, no amount of personal spatting took away from the undeniable greatness of the tracks, and Simon saw many of them as just that, examples of truly great songs.
In particular, though, one song stood out as a unique one, bringing up all other questions of what greatness is and how it is earned. “I would pick ‘Strawberry Fields [Forever]’—although there is your example of a total record. A very important record to me, I like it a lot,” he said.
‘A total record’ is an interesting phrase. Perhaps what Simon was getting at is that, in a way, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ feels bigger than just a song. Given how pioneering the track felt in terms of studio magic and the band’s ever-deepening interactions with technology and production, the single is so much more important to the band’s history and legacy than just another standalone release. Maybe that’s why the band chose to release it like that, not feeling the need to attach the song to any album when it already had so much strength solo.
For Simon, it’s one of those fascinating examples of a perfect song. It’s not that it’s particularly catchy, it’s not super accessible in terms of what the track is about or how it’s crafted, not in comparison to their older stuff. “You can’t even sing the song. It’s really hard to sing the song,” Simon said, as the track even rules out the potential of a good old-fashioned sing-along. But what makes it great is its thoroughness, as all the stylistic choices involved make it feel like so much more than just another song in the band’s discography.
That’s a feeling many other artists would agree with. Brian Wilson once famously said that, with one song, The Beatles managed to do everything he’d spent his whole career trying to do. “They did it already—what I wanted to do with Smile. Maybe it’s too late,” he said.
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