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Sun 2 August 2026 4:00, UK
Paul Simon didn’t always need to make the greatest song of all time to sound great.
He felt that there were so many opportunities every time he picked up a guitar, and even if he wasn’t out there trying to recreate the magic of Simon and Garfunkel or anything, he could still find the time to make a few great tunes every now and again whenever he found one rolling around inside his head. A lot of his best songs came from natural intuition, but when you look through his record collection, he did keep tabs on every artist that he grew up with.
Because when you think about it, Simon wouldn’t have been able to make anything without the core rock and roll stars laying the groundwork for him. He was knocked out by what Elvis Presley was doing whenever he heard ‘Mystery Train’ for the first time, but it wasn’t until the Everly Brothers came along that he had a model for what he and Art Garfunkel were going to do with their music.
The Everlys had that tender approach to vocal harmony that put them among the greatest in their field, but Simon needed something that was a bit more mature. He was completely fine singing those country-inspired tunes every now and again, but there was going to come a time when he needed to have a bit more meat in his lyrics than the simplistic side of life on every track.
Graceland at least showed how far he had come from working with a basic folk-rock set-up, but the lyrics were still not going to hold a candle to some of his heroes. Simon knew that he was definitely well above average when it came to most of his lyrics, but when it came to stacking his music up next to Bob Dylan, he was nowhere close. He was the most sincere musician to ever walk the earth, and here was Dylan showing everyone what pop music could really sound like.
That’s not to say that Dylan hasn’t had moments where he struck out, though. There are more than a few times where he has put his foot in his mouth on a few of his songs or managed to marginalise a good chunk of his fanbase, but no matter what kind of era he found himself in, Simon knew that he would always be listening to whatever new album Dylan would be putting out next.
Around the 2000s, records like Love and Theft were the kind of evergreen records that made Dylan a critical darling all over again, and Simon was convinced that he could keep listening to Dylan grow if he kept making records that hit as well as that one, saying, “I thought Love and Theft was an interesting album. I like to listen to Dylan, to find out what’s on his mind or what he’s hiding. But I don’t analyse what those guys are doing so much as listen to them to see what they’re up to.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And what’s on Dylan’s mind is usually a lot more interesting than what most people expect. No one would have thought that anyone would be making some of their best songs this late in the game, but Dylan seemed to be still itching for that next great song whenever he worked on tunes like ‘Murder Most Foul’. That’s not the sound of someone who’s tapped out, and Simon knew that kind of grind just as much as anyone.
Both he and Dylan were completely different when it came to the styles of songwriting they made, but they did have more than a few similarities when it came to the daily grind. Both of them were just looking for the next perfect song to come across their path, and when they actually managed to catch one, it was unlike anything that the world had ever heard.
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