Forty years ago this month, Paul Simon released Graceland, an album that became one of the defining records of his career, and one of the most celebrated and debated albums of its era.
The story famously begins with a cassette of South African township music that Simon couldn't stop listening to. He followed that sound to Johannesburg, where he began recording with local musicians, eventually building an album that also incorporated zydeco, Norteño music, gospel and the sounds of New York session players.
The record would go on to sell millions of copies and win the Grammy for Album of the Year. It would also generate enormous controversy over Simon’s decision to record in apartheid South Africa during a cultural boycott.
Music historian Ashley Kahn tells the whole complicated story in his new book, Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland.
When I talked to Ashley, he reminded me how much of the story is really about the process of making something when you don't yet know what it is.
“Nothing had calcified into a formulaic way of collaboration. It was open to all these different ideas. I think that Paul… it takes a certain artistic temperament to be able to surrender to the moment and what the music is telling you needs to be done structurally, lyrically, et cetera, melodically,” he said.
That surrender required Simon to rethink one of the things he was best known for: songwriting.
Instead of arriving with finished songs and asking musicians to play them, he often began with rhythm and with sound, and waited to discover what kind of song might be hiding inside.
“Not only is he doing a collaboration on this album, he's absolutely redoing his whole approach to songcraft,” said Ashley. “He's discovering that his words are just not matching these African rhythms, and so he starts to really go into the rhythm itself.“As opposed to starting with words and chords, he's starting from the rhythm, finding the words that work.”
And that process could be messy. In Johannesburg, Simon was working with musicians who came from very different musical traditions, sometimes without even a shared vocabulary for describing what they were trying to do.
“Here he is on the very first day in Johannesburg, and he's talking to a folk musician… and he's referring to a bridge… trying to get them to do the A part of a song versus a B part, but he only wants the B part. And they've never thought of music structures that way, or referred to it that way.”
Eventually they found a common language. And the sessions expanded outward, from Johannesburg to Louisiana, Los Angeles, New York and London, involving an enormous cast of musicians, engineers, producers and record-company people.
For Kahn, that's part of what makes the story worth revisiting forty years later.
“I want to return the reader (or maybe this is the first time people are discovering Graceland) ultimately the music should be at the end of the reading and the gathering of information. If I get them back to the music, my job is done,” he said.
Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland by Ashley Kahn is out now. You can watch my full conversation with Ashley Kahn here:
