Paul Simon - Graceland

When I was a ten year old and our family did road trips I remember travelling with exactly five albums: Billy Joel's Storm Front, Queen's Greatest Hits, Peter Combe's Toffee Apple, Bernard Bolan's I can't remember exactly what it was called but it had rude words so we all thought it was hilarious, and Paul Simon's Graceland. I don't know how it came about that we only had five cassettes in the car, or why it was that mum thought we needed such a diverse musical education (from this to that in the space of 100km!), but I'm grateful to her nonetheless.


For me Graceland became the quintessential driving and pondering album. It still is, and I'm proud to have introduced it to my own children (thanks to increased vehicle capacity we are now capable of carrying many more than five cassettes, but both Graceland and Toffee Apple remain in the collection). What my former ten year old self had to ponder I'll never recall, but even then I knew Graceland was something special.

But now I'm not so confident. Sure, people regularly label it one of the greatest albums of the 1980s, and it isn't hard to find it gracing a "greatest album ever" list. Don't get me wrong, I love this album too; it's a stuck-on-a-deserted-island kind of recording. But when my ten year old self listened carefully to the cryptic and confusing lyrics and failed to decipher deeper meaning I assumed it was because I wasn't wise enough. But as an older, more experienced me once again focused my attention on Simon's lyrics I find myself still on the outer, still not getting the joke. It feels like I'm searching for meaning in...noise.

In researching this album [the internet...why didn't I think of this before!!] I discovered that Graceland is based on ideas captured in two weeks of recordings made in Johannesburg, but that it actually took well over a year for Simon to write the album. He struggled to put lyrics (and melodies!) to the recordings, often challenged by the African rhythms. He also remained unsure of the album's thematic connection, and I think that lack of a vision is imprinted in the album. I wonder if he simply put interesting - but isolated - phrases together until he'd constructed a song, or if his poetry simply speaks at a level a simple engineer can't process.

From the title track, "Losing love is like a window in your heart. Everbody sees you're blown apart". It's an interesting line, a good line, but it's followed by "Everybody sees the wind blow". This line forms part of the same quote within the song so it must be related to the previous two lines, and yet there doesn't appear to me to be anything relating them.

I think you take from this album what you want. For me, discovering that Simon had trouble forming lyrics and melodies to his original recordings takes the away some of the gloss and leads me to think that his lyrics are simply a rhythmic accompaniment to the other instruments. Comprised of clever riffs and rhymes, sure, but ultimately providing no greater meaning. This guy probably disagrees.

Download from here. It's a 5 for me because I love listening to this album and, if it were a cassette, it would have literally been played to death.