Of Influential Albums 1 - The Paul Simon Songbook

One of those odd challenges came up on my personal social media page a couple of days ago. A musician friend of fifty years' standing "nominated" me to list ten albums that I felt had influenced my work. Having just listed ten favourite albums I wondered what the difference would be. As it happens there is a difference. Some of the same artists have actually appeared in both lists, but not necessarily the same albums by those artists. While the social media game only asks for the list, I thought it might be a more interesting challenge to try and explain why I feel certain albums influenced my work. This series of essays might well extend beyond the ten in my friend's challenge, but I'll see. I'll start by going over some of the reasons for including the ten on my social media page.

The Paul Simon Songbook is not the first album I bought. In truth I never actually bought it, but somehow I acquired it. I think it was amongst a pile of records my father brought home from somewhere that was throwing them out. This would have been one that didn't particularly interest him. It was either that or one my uncle passed on to me - I have a few of those. Uncle George was an original folkie and skiffle man. He knew and sometimes played with some of the performers I would see in folk clubs and festivals in the early 70s. I would have acquired this album around 1967/68, I suppose, some two or three years after it was recorded and released in the UK only. It wasn't released in the USA until 1981.

It wouldn't be truthful to rate myself as a Paul Simon "fan", this is the only one of his records I own, but I do understand and appreciate the craft he exhibits in his work. Paul Simon, like so many folk singers from overseas, based himself in London for a while during the sixties. He often performed solo. I've met a few people who saw some of those early performances and, by the accounts I've heard, he was still learning his craft. I had heard some of these songs in their Simon and Garfunkel versions such as the ones recorded on the "Wednesday Morning 3am", "Sounds of Silence" and "Parsley, Sage Rosemary And Thyme" albums. This solo collection was recorded in June 1965 after "Wednesday Morning 3am" and before the other two Simon and Garfunkel albums from 1966 in a studio in New Bond Street, a part of London I came to know very well when I left school and started working. 

Like most acoustic singer/songwriters of the time, Paul Simon's songs were heavily influenced by Bob Dylan, but on this album I really liked the sound of his guitar and his voice. His melodies, whilst clearly rooted in folk tradition, were developed beyond the more naive and derivative melodies found in much of Bob Dylan's early work. Many of the songs told stories, though none were of the epic proportions of some of Dylan's work. The lyrics were also less opaque than much of Bob Dylan's work and as a child I found that more appealing. Every song that either had already been or was later recorded with Art Gunfunkel sounded better to me in this solo format. I felt at the time, and still feel, that there was a wealth of emotion in these songs that was smoothed out in the Simon and Garfunkel harmonic formula. Given a choice of lush harmony of the duo or the soloist's flexibility to inject some emotion into the songs I always preferred the soloist. I've just realised this must be one of the earliest examples of me being at odds with mainstream opinion! The delivery of "I Am A Rock" and "He Was My Brother" in particular probably had a lasting influence on my aspirations for delivering some of my own songs. Other things about this album that touched me and stayed in my memory long enough to influence aspirations in my own writing include: 

• the traditional folk template such as in "April Come She Will"
• the social commentary found in "A Church Is Burning", "I Am A Rock", "The Sound Of Silence", "The Side Of A Hill" 
• the humour, not something normally associated with Paul Simon I suspect, of "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or [on my copy of the album, anyway] How I Was Lyndon B Johnson'd Into Submission)
• the empathy expressed in "A Most Peculiar Man" combined with a bit of bite. I love the line, "and all the people said, "What a shame that he's dead, but wasn't he a most peculiar man?"

Side one 1. "I Am a Rock" 2:52 2. "Leaves That Are Green" 2:41 3. "A Church is Burning" 3:38 4. "April Come She Will" 1:55 5. "The Sound of Silence" 3:19 6. "A Most Peculiar Man" 2:26 Side two 1. "He Was My Brother" Paul Kane* 2:58 2. "Kathy's Song" 3:42 3. "The Side of a Hill" Kane* 2:28 4. "A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission)" 2:25 5. "Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall" 2:27 6. "Patterns