Paul Simon says he’s done touring. In fact, just last week, as the 76-year-old American songwriting legend prepped for the final leg of his “Homeward Bound” farewell tour, Simon said he may very well be done writing songs altogether.
"I haven't written a new song in a couple of years, now. I think after Stranger To Stranger, a funny thing happened when I finished,” he told NPR’s Bob Boilen. “I literally felt like a switch clicked and I said, 'I'm finished.'"
And you should believe him.
Simon — who was born in Queens and started writing tunes before he was 10 years old — has literally lived a life devoted to songmanship, and he has penned some of the best ones ever. On Friday night, more than 10,000 well-wishers watched him play 26 of those songs for the last time (Simon has said that any future shows he’ll do will be one-off types for charity). Over the course of nearly two-and-a-half hours, Simon sprinkled storytelling into a set filled with familiar hits, rearranged favorites and exactly the kind of musicality you’d expect from a mind that’s poetically articulated at least two generations’ deepest, most intimate inner thoughts and feelings.
SIMON SAID
Paul Simon biographer Robert Hilburn on what to expect at the songwriter’s Tampa farewell show
At Tampa’s Amalie Arena, both of those generations were present as gray-haired boomers who could name at least five Jerry Landis songs tapped their toes next to 30-and-40-somethings whose first encounters with Simon (and his singing partner Art Garfunkel) came about two decades after John F. Kennedy was shot dead in the fall of 1963.
Simon has said that he wrote the opening lines to “Sound Of Silence” in the darkness of his bathroom while saddened by the assassination. More than half a century after the song’s release, even on the rhythmically altered set-closing version Simon played on Friday, its plaintive verses pulled heartstrings and evoked introspection.
And while Rhymin’ Simon certainly had devotees up and on the soles of their shoes during several moments in the set (zydeco-flavored runs through “Dazzling Blue” and “Boy In the Bubble,” a funked-up “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” and a washboard-driven take on “That Was Your Mother” that had Simon himself hot-stepping in a satin purple sport coat all come to mind), Pauly was actually best when he was locked into and lost in the arrangements executed by his incredible 14-piece backing band, yMusic.
BETTER CALL PAUL
Former L.A. Times critic Robert Hilburn has turned in the definitive Paul Simon biography
“Most bands have a very perfunctory soundcheck, they go out and just check the sound levels, but he actually works over the songs and tries to find new ways to present them,” Simon biographer Robert Hilburn told CL in a recent interview, adding that Simon has been known to work with his band for at least two hours a day.
“So the band calls it the matinee because it's like a real show in the afternoon.”
The devotion to a song — its beginnings, birth and many different incarnations — was on full display during the polyrhythmic meditation of “Rewrite,” and it was disarming on “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War,” which opened a two-song suite that found members of yMusic surrounding Simon, who stood without a guitar, swimming in the sweet, swelling sounds of bowed cello and violin, flute, trumpet and bass clarinet. The cut was already a sensitive, yet familiar, spot from Simon’s 1983 solo album Hearts and Bones, but in the hands of yMusic — which undressed the tune and repackaged it even more beautifully that it was presented before — Simon’s simple, stunning melodies made the lines about “the penguins, the moonglows, the orioles” legitimate tearjerkers.
Watch Paul Simon's "René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War" (from the new album, In the Blue Light), performed live in Copenhagen with yMusic and Mark Stewart. Arrangement by Robert Sirota.
In the Blue Light is out everywhere today! https://t.co/wg7rItKwkw pic.twitter.com/BrOP0I1VgS
— Paul Simon (@PaulSimonMusic) September 7, 2018
yMusic and Simon reimagined that song on his latest album, In The Blue Light (released on the same day as the Amalie Arena show), and its new life mirrored the vitality Simon continues to breathe into some of his most iconic songs as this tour comes to a close (the final shows come at the end of the month at New York City’s Madison Square Garden and Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Simon’s hometown of Queens).
The near-perfect phrasing on the verses from “Still Crazy After All These Years” was even more soulful against rejuvenated electric piano, and the iconic working person’s tale that Simon weaves on “The Boxer” feels increasingly relevant in a time when it still seems like the rich are getting richer while the commoners, well, make do and generally get shut out of the polarized bickering happening online and in Washington D.C.
Simon — who only got “political” when his story about throwing the first pitch at a New York Yankees spring training game illicited boos — seems to know that we’re all still having a hard tune out here.
“Strange times, huh?,” he asked before playing “American Tune.” A short, sort of awkward pause followed before Simon offered this bit of advice: “Don’t give up.”
To the most jaded among us, Simon’s farewell to songwriting and the road at large may look like giving up, but Simon truly has nothing left to prove. His songbook did not come easy, and his career has not been without its pitfalls. Simon never let those pitfalls defeat him though, and he has chosen to instead weave messages of hope into his songs.
SLIDESHOW
31 photos of Paul Simon saying farewell to Tampa’s Amalie Arena
“Love is amazing, and like I say on the You're The One album, it's something you want so desperately that it can make you laugh out loud when you get it,” Simon has said in past interviews. “It's like medicine for us.”
Maybe that’s why Simon, and (more importantly) his songs have endured. Not just because they expose universal truths about who we are, but because they love us back, and because songs like “Questions For The Angels” and “The Cool, Cool river” continue to encourage us to ask the “why” and “what are we gonna do about it” when things get tough.
Paul Simon, the mortal man, may be bowing out while he’s on top, but his songs, God willing, will always survive and, maybe, for many more people for generations to come, they’ll be a guiding light, that glimmer of hope when the world seems so silent and so very, very dark. And as the lights went down on the very last song of what is presumably Paul Simon’s very last show in Tampa, it was hard not think about those opening lines from “Rewrite.”
“I'm working on my rewrite, that's right,” Simon sings. “Gonna change the ending, throw away the title, and toss it in the trash.”
Simon will undoubtedly spend more time with his family, writing his future and working for the causes (like conservation) he believes in. The question now is, how will we use the lesson from Simon’s songbook to write the pages of our own?
Listen to a playlist from the show below, and see more pictures of the concert here.
Setlist
America
50 Ways To Leave Your Lover
The Boy In The Bubble
Dazzling Blue
That Was Your Mother
Rewrite
Mother and Child Reunion
Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard
Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War
Can't Run, But
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Wristband
Spirit Voices
The Obvious Child
Questions For The Angels
The Cool, Cool River
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
You Can Call Me Al
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Late in the Evening
Still Crazy After All These Years
Graceland
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Homeward Bound
Kodachrome
The Boxer
American Tune
The Sound of Silence
This article appears in Sep 6-13, 2018.