Old-timer's new tunes

music mojo

Sitting on the windowsill behind Paul Simon’s desk in his midtown Manhattan office was an instrument shaped like a teardrop: a gopichand from India, with 1 string down the middle and 2 flexible bamboo sides. At an interview there, Simon demonstrated how to pluck the string and squeeze the sides to get the ‘boing’ that’s the first sound on Stranger to Stranger, his 12th solo studio album and his first since 2011.

Stranger to Stranger is a set of songs that crack jokes and ponder questions about love, death, spirituality, baseball, economic inequality, brain chemistry and music itself. It’s the latest ambitious, tuneful installment in a career that has had far more to do with curiosity than crowd-pleasing.

Along the way, Simon has sold millions of records, with Art Garfunkel as Simon & Garfunkel in the 1960s and in a globe-hopping solo career ever since. He has racked up Grammy Awards and accolades; he has also received scathing receptions for projects like his 1998 Broadway musical, The Capeman, although revivals concentrating on the songs rather than the storytelling were praised. “I’m a wanderer,” Simon said. “So much of this record, and the way I record, is about just going there to see: What is it? What can you learn?”

Of self-improvement

At 74, Simon could be comfortably retired, savouring the continuing popularity of his older songs like ‘America’, which he donated to ads for the Bernie Sanders campaign, or ‘The Sound of Silence’, which became a hit last year for the hard-rock band Disturbed. Or he could stay on the road performing his oldies just the way his original baby-boomer fans remember them (though he recently said any reunion with Garfunkel is “out of the question”). He could also keep trying to write new songs in the style of those oldies. Instead, Simon’s recent albums are as experimental as anything he has ever recorded. “He trusts himself, and he pushes himself. That’s a very good combination,” said the composer Philip Glass, a longtime friend and occasional collaborator. “If one part of that equation isn’t there, then you’re in trouble.”

Simon has a clear imperative. “To make a pop record, if you don’t make it really interesting, nobody’s going to listen to it,” he said.

On Stranger to Stranger, Simon is, above all, playing by ear. “The sound is what led me to everything,” he said. “The theme of this album — it’s not a lyrical theme. It’s a sound theme. This is the time that we’re living in, and this is what it sounds like to me from the sources that I find interesting. In a way it’s not that different from hip-hop guys that are interested in sound, like Kanye or Kendrick.”

The album opens with‘The Werewolf’, a jovial shuffle that gibes at the rich getting richer amid Ignorance and arrogance /The national debate’; it was written well before the current presidential campaign, Simon said. ‘Cool Papa Bell ’ is named after the fastest runner in the Negro Leagues, before baseball was integrated, while ‘The Riverbank’ depicts the funeral of a veteran who committed suicide. The title song reflects on songwriting and romance: “Love endures all the carnage and the useless detours,” Simon sings.

The music on Stranger to Stranger exults in percussion; 4 of the album’s first 6 tracks don’t use guitar at all. The songs often stretch beyond pop’s typical 4 minutes and take startling twists. They subtly cohere, with some songs sharing rhythmic elements; they also continue to expand Simon’s sonic vocabulary with unique instruments as well as with electronics, loops and samples.

Simon has often been called a perfectionist, but Mark Stewart, a guitarist in Simon’s band since 1998, calls that a “2-dimensional” description. “It’s more of a sonic safari,” Stewart said. “You’re looking for the rare bird. And he’s just so consistent in his finding the bird. And of course, we’re all assembled to help. But you can’t finish a musical sentence for the guy. He’s going to stay on the trail till he finds it.”

The album’s snappiest song,‘Wristband’, starts as a fictional anecdote and turns into a larger metaphor for privilege. Its narrator is a singer who goes out for a smoke, hears the stage door lock behind him and realises he left behind his backstage-pass wristband as he faces a bouncer who’s “a well-dressed 6-foot-8.” Eventually, riots ensue among “Kids that can’t afford the cool brand/Whose anger is a shorthand/For you’ll never get a wristband.”

The music for the song grew out of the sliding tones of a West African talking drum track. Simon asked Carlos Henriquez, from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, to duplicate them on the bass, and found a stretch that felt like a montuno, a Latin dance vamp.

Simon’s son Adrian pointed him toward the electronic music of an Italian producer, Digi G’Alessio, who calls himself Clap! Clap!; Simon met with him while touring Europe with Sting and later visited his studio in Sardinia to choose some bubbling electronic syncopation. There are also hand claps from a flamenco group — Simon recorded the whole group together and isolated the clapping, then slowed it down digitally — along with percussion and horns from Simon’s touring band. And the whole multitracked assemblage simply jumps.

Album sampling

The album’s sounds also include instruments invented by the composer Harry Partch — among them chromelodeon and cloud-chamber bowls — that divide an octave into 43 steps, which are used to bend the harmonic ambience of ‘Insomniac’s Lullaby’. And they include the gospel voices of the Golden Gate Quartet, recorded in 1939, pitch-shifted and played forward and backward. Listening to the group’s vocals in reverse, Simon heard the words, ‘Street Angel’, giving him a song title and a character mentioned in 2 of the album’s songs: a homeless, poetry-spouting schizophrenic who ends up in the hospital. “Too much dopamine, and you’re schizophrenic,” Simon said. “But just over here, and you’re a visionary.”

Simon is already on tour, mostly playing theatres, although his New York City date is on June 30 at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, where he grew up. His band convenes Africans (Nguini and Bakithi Kumalo, from the Graceland band), contemporary classical musicians (from YMusic, Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Philip Glass Ensemble), a percussionist (Jamey Haddad) who’s versed in jazz, Middle Eastern and Indian music, a jazz-rooted saxophonist (Andy Snitzer), an accordionist adept at Tex-Mex, zydeco and blues (Joel Guzman) and a drummer from Nashville, Jim Oblon, who “knows the sound of rockabilly and 50s blues that I’m always trying to get,” Simon said, noting that all his influences “mesh together” live. “So all kinds of forms can coalesce in some way that breaks this feeling that we’ve been dumbed down.”