LYRICS

1964 – 2008

Across five decades, with each new album he has recorded, iconic singer-songwriter Paul Simon has continually pushed the boundaries of popular music. From the brace of top ten hits with Art Garfunkel that provided the soundtrack for the turbulent Sixties, to the breakout solo work that has produced some of the most memorable and enduring songs of our time, Simon’s music has always been a distinctive synthesis of melody, rhythm and lyrics. Those lyrics, crafted as artfully and unconventionally as Simon’s tunes, have been sometimes cloaked in enigma, sometimes heart-stopping in their breathtaking simplicity. Always, they have lingered in the listener’s mind long after the music has stopped.

LYRICS 1964-2008 (Simon & Schuster; November 11, 2008; $35.00) is the first comprehensive collection of Paul Simon’s incomparable opus. Spanning Simon’s entire career—from the Simon & Garfunkel debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM and the haunting number one hit “The Sounds of Silence” to his most recent effort, Surprise— this beautifully crafted volume, designed by the award-winning Chip Kidd, and illustrated with dozens of photos and notes from Simon’s personal archives, is an unrivalled celebration of this musical giant’s legacy.

“Paul Simon’s songs have become a part of life’s fabric, an inner walking-around music,” writers New Yorker editor David Remnick in the introduction to LYRICS 1964-2008. “You stroll around New York and hear the echoes of his loneliness, his comedy, his passion, his ache, and his growing older. Even now, as he writes new songs and immerses himself in yet another song form and rhythmic realm, he has secured his place in musical history. Simon stands with both the unpretentious masters of his own youth—the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson—and his greatest predecessors: Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Rodgers & Hart, the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer, and Cole Porter. As you browse through this book, the enormous (and unfinished) catalog of Paul Simon’s art, you will see just how many songs he’s written that rate with “How Deep is the Ocean” and “Stormy Weather.”

Though Simon’s classic songs are never far from memory, a trip through LYRICS 1964-2008 will take his cross-generational fans back to the exuberant nostalgia of “Mrs. Robinson,” the wistful hope of “America” and the equally wistful regret of “American Tune.” Here the ageless anthem “Bridge over Troubled Water” stands alongside that paean to the passage of time, “Still Crazy After All These Years” and the hilariously rueful “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” Redemption, a recurring Simon theme, can be found in both the glorious gospel-tinged “Loves Me Like a Rock” and the world music-blended brilliance of “Graceland”—“But I’ve reason to believe/We all will be received/in Graceland.”

Even while working in traditional forms, Simon has long pushed outward against the confines of the popular song, and his lyrics, like his music, have been influenced by the traditions of New Orleans, Jamaica, Africa, Brazil, and beyond. Also included here are all of Simon’s lyrics for Songs from the Capeman, his theatrical collaboration with the West Indian Nobel Prize-winner, Derek Walcott.

Paul Simon’s “music is appreciated by me, and probably the majority of his fans, just by letting his words and music wash over us as an experience—and what a powerful, rich, and varied experience that can be,” writes artist Chuck Close is his foreword. “No less a composer than Philip Glass has called Paul the greatest songwriter of our time.”

LYRICS 1964-2008 is an invaluable document of American popular culture and a lasting testament of the homegrown genius of Paul Simon.

www.amazon.com/Lyrics-1964-2008-Paul-Simon/dp/141658692X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=U...

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lyrics-1964-2008/Paul-Simon/e/978141658...