Pushkin.

Paul Simon's one of the greatest living songwriters.

Since debuted with Art Garfunkel in nineteen fifty seven, Paul's written countless songs that are quintessential to the American psyche.

This year, at eighty one years old, he's released the latest edition to his beloved catalog Seven Psalms, to an outpouring of critical acclaim.

In twenty twenty one, Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam released the audio original Miracle and Wonder Conversations with Paul Simon.

It's an intimate look into Simon's songwriting, alongside never before heard live studio versions of hits including The Boxer, The Sound of Silence, and of course Graceland.

If you haven't listened to Miracle and Wonder, I highly recommend checking it out.

It's available on Audible and at Pushkin dot FM.

This fall, at Pushkin will be releasing an updated version of the audiobook with a brand new chapter featuring even more from Malcolm and Paul's newly recorded deep dive into Seven Psalms.

To celebrate this newest chapter in Paul Simon's sixty five year career and the latest edition to Miracle and wonder.

On today's episode of Broken Record, Malcolm Gladwell sits back down with Paul to discuss the creation of his newest album.

Paul explains why he Field's music reviews are more about the writer than the piece of music being critiqued, and he talks about why many of his lyrics take a more conversational bent.

He also recalls how the title for his newest record came to him in a dream after he considered never writing another piece of music again.

This is Broken Record liner notes for the digital age.

I'm justin ritchman.

Here's Malcolm Gladwell with Paul Simon.

So how you been he this album?

I was reading through the reviews.

I was like, can I find a bad review?

I can't find one.

This has never happened.

I'm so used to getting bad reviews myself that when someone like you like hit for the cycle on this is like, there's no.

That's a great I like, I love all baseball metaphors.

Well, it's very pleasant to have a hit.

You know.

I don't read reviews, so I didn't read any of them.

I'll tell you they are one hundred percent.

They are rhapsodic.

You should read them.

There's the fantastic.

They're like, you know, if.

I do read them, I will not be happy.

The reviews are about the reviewer.

Yeah, so number one, you you're getting an insight into somebody's ego, which is sort of private in a way.

So I'm not really comfortable with that.

Number Two, some people get what I'm doing and other people don't really get one what I'm doing.

They still, evidently with these reviews, they still like it, maybe even like it a lot, but I don't.

They don't go to the reasons that I put there.

So, like, I'll give you an example of things that I've heard, because I haven't read any He's dealing with his mortality.

I can understand that somebody would say it's not happens not to be the case.

You know, the way that I write, I would say from that they're probably mostly going on the song.

Wait.

You know the way that I write is it's partly true personally, it's partly like a wish that I have, It's partly other people's lives.

But it's a it's a character.

Even though the character is me, it's not really me.

It's a character.

So that character is dealing with the issue of Mortality.

That's because the way that song was written maybe one of the last or the last song.

The reason that it's placed there is because that's a way to conclude the piece.

So it's appropriate, but it's not consuming my time and thought.

Of course, it's it's there, of course, but I'm not getting something out that that I have to say.

I'm concluding this long piece in such a way that it feels hopefully that it feels satisfying.

Did you right Weight, thinking that it was going to be the final.

Yeah, I wrote it as the final piece, so I think it was either Weight or Trail of Volcanoes that was the final piece that I wrote.

What happened with Trailer Volcanos was I had another song and it didn't fit anywhere, and so I said, I have to lose this one.

It does It's good.

It was a guitar piece.

It wasn't a written song, but it didn't fit musically anywhere.

I just couldn't find its place.

I was at that point in the construction of the piece or the album where my craftsmanship and my editing is dictating what I'm doing.

It says to me that is slowing everything down.

No matter where you put it, and I'm looking for something to continue the momentum, to get to the final lord and the conclusion.

Even though I didn't know what the conclusion was at that point, I understood from years of making records that it wasn't right for the set.

So I tossed it out and I said, I need a piece that has more of a sense of rhythm than the rest of the album, because the rest of the album is very free rhythmically.

There's no drums, there's no bass, but a Trail of Volcanoes comes from a loop a bell of bells, so it's got a real pulse to it.

Even though I don't keep the bells going all the time, I remove them and bring them back.

But that served a good purpose for where it was in the album, just in terms of of your ear, not in terms of subject matter.

So that piece found was placed where it is in the album for those reasons, and the end piece is there also as an end piece.

And then from those two decisions, I then wrote wrote the lyrics.

I didn't know what I was going to write in Trail of Volcanoes, which in a way you can tell from from the way it begins.

Some of my songs begin very conversationally to me.

That's if I had to look at some old song and tell you what was I thinking, even if I couldn't remember it, I would say, oh, I didn't know what I was thinking.

So I just began and Trail of Volcanoes.

When I was young, I carried my geto.

You know, that's a simple sentence.

I don't know what the point of I don't know what the point of the piece would be, but I did have the line trail of volcanoes.

It was in my notes.

So that's what that song does.

As it happens, it has an appropriate thought for the entire piece.

But as far as the ear goes, it's the repetitive rhythm that gives the ear a sense of I don't know, hopefully, hopefully it gives it a pleasure after things have been sort of floating and not exactly a rhythmic, but not with a tight rhythm.

Here's a loop and weight becomes.

After these six songs, what subject would I be on?

And someone I played it for at that early stage said, heard the first six and I just had the track for the seventh, and said, hearing these first six, I just feel like I really don't want to die, and there was the subject of wait, so anyway back to reviews and critics, that's how that came about.

But if you were writing and saying, well, mortality is on his mind, it's not wrong to say that, but it's I'm not interested in as a thought because it's not actually what I was thinking.

What I was thinking was sort of mundane compared to the idea of me contemplating my mortality.

I was constructing a piece.

Yeah, go back a little bit.

I was curious.

The last record you had made prior to this was twenty sixteen, So this is the this is the longest break you took between right music, new songs, new songs in your life.

Yeah, it probably was when I stopped performing and said I'm going to stop, which I think was in twenty eighteen.

Yeah.

One of my thoughts was, well, first of all, I thought, this show that I'm doing, I've really taken it as far as I can take it in terms of rethinking songs and arrangements and anything that I did to that show as it then existed, it really would be in the danger one of being real Coco, you know, just be adding little things.

And because I thought it's really right now, So I don't want to continue doing this because I'm not going to get to the nourishment of rethinking songs and arrangements because they're really pretty well thought out.

And if I don't get that, then i'd I don't like performing because I'm bored.

So I thought it's completed.

Its cycle is completed.

It's not a bad time to stop.

And as for writing, if I continued writing from the way that I wrote the last piece of original music, which was A Stranger to Stranger, I would be continuing problem solving in a way that started when I began to write when I was thirteen.

So from the age of thirteen, when I wrote my first songs, my songwriting evolved in the way that the way my songwriting evolved.

So if I think of it as problem solving, I would continue problem solving in the same way.

And from that, this is my internal conversation.

I said, so I can make an album that's as good as Stranger the Stranger again, and I thought that album was good, but I'm not really enticed to do that, so I'll just not do it.

I'll just stop, And if I want to find something that's challenging, and that's new for me.

The way to do that is to shut everything down and begin again.

That was my thought.

I didn't then start to work on anything because time went by, and then I had this dream that said, oh, you were writing seven psalms or you should be writing seven psalms.

So I began, you know, whether it was subconsciously or not, I don't know it.

But I began to start from scratch again, picked up a guitar, and the wrote guitar pieces, and you know, got more thinking about how I played guitar, and just I went back to what was the simplest way, and I started to build from there.

After about a year of writing guitar pieces, words started to come also from dreams, which is unusual for me.

I mean, it's it's happened in the past that I've thought of a line or two, but that's not usually the way I The way I write this was this was unusual.

Do you remember can you even play for me the first little bit of music that got you going on this?

Yeah, the first thing that I did was to play that, really the first song, that's where I had, and then I began to put Eventually it got into a pattern which was.

No.

The first one was that was the first one.

The second pattern that I play is twice, so so the first two patterns are The third pattern was another variation.

M h.

Those four variations on the on that lick, they were necessitated by the lyrics that I was singing.

Explain what you mean by that.

The Lord is my engineer, I don't want.

The Lord is my engineer, lost, my use and.

Loss.

The earth Lord is the earth ride on.

So that's why the first is long.

The second is did dobby loss of face in the atmosphere, the path I slip and slide on.

That's the conclusion of those things.

So once I had written those words, I said, well, the guitar part has to go this way.

Oh, I see.

You begin with the guitar part, write the lyrics and then adapt.

Then you start to Then you start and fiddle.

You write something that's just comes to you for reasons that you can't explain, and you start to think of what you might say over that, and when you find what you want to say, you modify the accompaniment so that it fits.

Then it becomes a symmetrical pattern, and that pattern is repeated throughout every time the Lord's section comes, that pattern is repeated.

We're going to take a quick break and then come back with more from Malcolm Gladwell and Paul Simon.

We're back with more from Malcolm Gladwell and Paul Simon.

Can you give me another example from of the kind of loop between the music and the lyrics that you were working on with it.

Yeah.

The process for me is a thought that comes from someplace that I have I don't know, just one second it's not there, the next second it's there.

And with that piece of information, it then gets put into the pile of potentially to be edited that pile and the words start to come and as if it was as if you were sculpting a piece of wood or stone, you slice away and chip away to find the right shape.

And in the case of the Seven Psalms album, because it's really a voice and guitar, even though there are a lot of other instruments augmenting the sound of the guitar, essentially what you're hearing is a voice and a guitar, which means that particular attention has to be paid to what the guitar is playing and the dynamics of the guitar the volume of you know how soft it gets, and because that's an acoustic guitar, just the way you play it automatically has in the nature of it is that some notes are going to be louder than others because of the way the guitar is built and just acoustics.

So one of the things that happened in Seven Psalms that was different from the other albums is that I really paid a lot of attention to making the notes, the individual notes of a piece be balanced and have a dynamic to them.

So if one note stuck out in a way I didn't want, I could lower it in pro tools, or the opposite.

If it was too soft and I needed it to punch more, I could raise it it.

So one of the things that's unique about Seven Psalms for me is that I'm treating the guitar as an entire orchestra.

I use the rhythm of it that's partly drum.

There's not drum there, and even when I play that, I'm muting it partly, whereas I'm not muting this.

So because it's just a guitar and a voice, I'm paying a lot of attention to what's going on with the guitar.

And from that I'm adding these other percussion instruments, mostly bells, but gongs.

I can show you there's a bell.

I don't know why this is called an elephant bell, but so here it is.

It's not so much the hit that I'm interested in.

It's the it's the overtones that are gonna continueing.

Has a little pulse, so I would attach that to certain notes.

Where does that sound to use?

What's throughout?

The rabbit just must probably used one hundred times?

And is that it?

It's called an elephant bell.

It's called an elephant is it.

Actually a kind of vintage?

It's not new.

I don't know how old it is.

It's very unusual looking.

It doesn't look it doesn't look it's probably uh, it's probably Asian.

It's kind of claws on it.

It's probably you know, uh, out of the Indonesian world.

Where did you get it?

Well?

I have a lot of different percussion instruments.

Some I picked up on the road.

Some are given to me by guys in the band because they knew I was interested in percussion, So over the years have collected a lot of it.

So the guitar has a has a bell in it, It has a ring in it, and sometimes that attach this spell to it.

Very subtly.

It's not meant to.

Be, you know, really noticed as much as felt.

This bell that I'm holding now is called this is what we call this a spinning bell.

Oh that's lovely.

I don't know if you can hear it with this microphone, but it goes.

That's a different bell use at a different time.

It's just like a brass.

A four inches wide and it sort of looks like a pointy hat and it's an eighth of an inch thick, and it's made out of brass, and it has a string.

And you spin this string around so that when it unwinds, it spins, and as it spins it the sound changes.

I'll do it again.

I don't know whether these microphones are going to be able to pick this up, but that's just one of ten different sounds that I used.

And for me, if you consider this record to be a spiritually oriented record, the spirituality is mostly expressed in the music, even though the words are on the same subject.

But the unspoken, the silent conversation, so to speak, well, the conversation without words is the deeper spiritual for me because it's an express it's some expression of something that I hear and feel without words.

So, going back to reviews, if you're not focused on that aspect, and most reviewers are not going to focus on that because most reviewers are writers, and so they focus on words.

Some reviewers or musicians as well, and they hear these other things.

When I was mixing the record, I played played this for a musician friend of mine who happened to be in another adjacent studio, and he said, I like to listen to it at home, and then when he saw me the next day, he said, I kept thinking to myself, did I just hear I thought I heard a glimmer of and then I wasn't sure.

I kept thinking throughout the record, did I just hear that sound that I imagine that's exactly what I wanted?

Who is the musician?

It was Chris Steely, who was a brilliant mandolin player, and he was hearing one of those percussion notes that whether.

He was hearing that or it could have been any number of things.

Because I viewed there are so many subtle sounds used throughout this piece, so many but the way I was hearing and the way he heard it was as if the sound stretched all the way to a horizon and I could just about make out what the sound was that in the farthest place away.

So that that's a very deep, not deep, you know, intellectual expiracy of it.

It has a deep visual perspective to sound.

It goes way back, and it makes the guitar, this simple acoustic guitar sound bigger.

Anyway, That's what I'm trying to But.

Wait, Paul, that was a review that you liked.

I mean, effectively, he was a reviewer and you liked what he had to It's like, conceptually.

Yeah, because what he said was exactly what I hoped for.

His interests was really piqued, but he wasn't sure whether his interest was meant to be peaked or whether he imagined it.

Well, that's great because now you're really interested.

Did I hear that I loved his question?

Did I hear that?

Well?

Question, the answer is yes, you did.

And when you become aware that there's an entire conversation going on way in the background that's related to what's going on in the foreground with guitar and voice, then for me as the composer, it's much more interesting.

But that doesn't mean that when people listen to this record that they have to be aware of that.

Most people, they're not supposed to be aware of it.

It's just supposed to be pleasurable, just supposed to say, I really like that.

Why, I don't know, I just liked it.

That's fine, that's what.

That's how most people hear musicians say what was that sound, because they're trained to do that.

Well, in this case, I was going to talk about the good.

Problem is that the lyrics are so good that you get distracted.

I listened to it several times.

Well, one of the times I listened to it the way I remember listening to records in the day, when you'd have the lyrics from the album cover and you would read the lyrics as you were hearing them.

And you do that, you know, and one of your first year second listeners, just so you can kind of locate everything.

And I was doing that.

I was doing this yesterday, and I was like, you know, it was incredibly important because maybe really focus for a moment on the tree.

And I was gonna touch with this because I think the writing here is as some of the best you've ever done.

It's exquisite.

There's a and I say it says now I'm responding as a writer, because I'm a writer.

There's a little bit.

For example, in my professional opinion, the line about the cows is as funny a line as you've as you've written.

I had that line for a long time.

I heard two cows in a conversation.

One called the other one a name in my professional opinion, all cows in the country was spear of the blame.

I mean, come on, it's like that's in the pantheon of great falls.

I'm a line.

Well, I don't know what that pantheon is, but anyway, to me, the funny thing was the two cows in conversation, and that came from a montalk where I lived.

There's like a on the road that I drive up to our places.

There's a big field and there are cows there, and you know, two cows were like leaning over the leaning over the fence.

And so I thought of that line and wrote it down.

It wasn't for anything.

It was just a line that I saved and put in there my professional opinion.

You know, I should say this, really, I think the truth is that for people who enjoy enjoyed this record, the enjoyment is not enhanced by me explaining any of this stuff.

I don't think it helps.

It's better left unexplained.

If it's your job to understand how records are put together, either you're a writer, or you're a musician, or you're a producer or an engineer, well then you're really interested in it.

But as a person who's not that and just an average listener, they don't need to know that I put this bill over here for this reason or that.

Or it's either an idea that works and people like it and in this case they seem to really like it, or it doesn't work, or you know, and people don't.

They don't hear it, and they're they're not interested, which is also a fact that that's going on too.

There's a lot of people who never heard this, never will and don't care.

Yeah, well, we don't want to go back to fecial meaning for a moment, just because that was the when I was kind of fixating on.

Can you talk a little bit about how the interaction between the music and the words In that case.

This is about the structure of the entire piece.

The first two songs, The Lord and Love is like a braid.

They have a certain feel to them, more like ballads and a certain mood.

I don't know what you call want to call it, doesn't matter what you want to call it.

It has a certain mood.

So this again goes to me as an editor of the piece that I'm working on.

I think the listener who has heard this first two songs and it's probably about eight or nine minutes worth, they have inferred a certain mood about this piece.

But I don't want that to happen, so I purposefully make the third piece to break that inference.

So instead of having pieces that were.

Which was The Lord or.

That kind of playing, I'm playing something that's like a kind of an old bluesy Jimmy Reid kind of that's a very different mood.

You don't stop, don't stop.

I'm enjoying myself.

For the reason I can't remember, you know, the reason I'm not playing more is that, well, I haven't played it in a long time, so I'm sort of going by muscle memory.

Yeah.

The reason when you said that the this isn't really just an album, you confronting your mortality and The reason I agree with that is that that song you're having so much fun.

It's like there's there's everything.

There's mischief in it, there's a little bit of street sass, there's I can see you as a kid on the streets of Queens, like you're both commenting on and kind of mocking a little bit of you know, the popular culture.

I don't know.

It's just like, it's not a song about a guy at the end of his life confronting his mortality.

It's about a song about a guy in the middle of everything, like you know, right, fun in.

That it has fun and it has jokes.

Yes, it has good morning, mister indignation.

It's so the mood of the first two pieces is changed, or hopefully is changed by the rhythm of this piece and the lyrics which have jokes or humor in them as well as their commentary, and it by the end of the pieces, the piece is summed up with all that really matters is the one who became us, anointed and gamed with his opinion.

So that brings me back to the theme of where the entire piece is headed.

And now I'm set for really the beginning of the album.

Your forgiveness.

From here on, it's going to be sort of intense and growing.

So the first the first two songs introduce you to the mood and the theme.

The third song says, don't get too settled into that and think that this is not what people are thinking.

This is what I'm thinking as someone who's observing attention span of a listening audience or imagining their attention span and trying to make it as enjoyable as possible by not allowing you to get bored too early.

Yeah, but it's very I mean, remembering back to our long conversations two years ago.

It's typical of your kind of writing and communication style that you'd like to establish something and then say, wait a minute, wait a minute, and then the humor often comes in you amending the impression that you've given.

That's right.

Yeah, there's a line someone in one of the reviews, someone qullted that lovely line where you said, I'm a man who likes to travel, but maybe not since I lived.

What's the line?

Oh, that's from Darling Lorraine.

That's a perfect example of this.

I think that might have been the first time that I may have used that kind of joke.

The line is all my life I've been a wanderer, which I wrote because I just make up things as I'm searching for a melody.

I wrote that line and thought, what bullshit, you know, So what it ends up in the song is all my life.

I've been a wanderer.

Not really, I mostly lived in my parents' home.

Anyway, Lorraine and I got married, and I love that the subject changes completely one hundred day degrees.

He says a line it's just a lie.

Then he says, ah, you know that's bullshit.

Really anyway, back to Lorraine and I.

We got married, and that's the way conversations are.

We don't just talk on one straight subject.

We do this and then there's an interruption and we go over here and we say, oh, that reminds me I have to pick up my clothes at the cleaners, or a funny thing that somebody said.

It's just the mind changes all the time, and songs can be the same, and when they are it doesn't upset the listener.

I don't think.

We have to pause for another quick break, and then we'll come back with more from Malcolm Gladwell and Paul Simon.

We're back with the rest of Malcolm Gladwell's conversation with Paul Simon.

My favorite component I don't I guess we don't want to call them songs.

I don't know what we call them.

But Sacred Heart is the one that I was really drawn to.

I wanted to talk about that one because it has on just on the writing front.

There's that one little bit about when the kids get in the car and they say they would have motored down.

I haven't been done here.

And then we talked about the boy about he doesn't talk much anymore, just to the voices inside his head.

The boy just gazed down at the floor and nodded once or twice at what she said.

That little section begins with her voice was a blend of regional perfumes.

We have no destination.

It's another one of those things where I was like, this is as beautiful and perfect a section, lyrical section as you've ever done.

It's like, thank you.

It's an entire scene, in a brilliant, moving, powerful scene in four lines.

Well, yeah, I could use you as well, my reviewer.

You can review all my stuff.

But I now, I don't know where that came from.

Her voice, blend of regional perfume.

But it sang perfectly, and it also had a description of when you.

Say you, when you say it, it sang perfectly, what do you mean?

It had the right syllables and the right sound to go with the melody that I wanted to sing.

I didn't have to push ors fitted in or it was a natural flow of words.

But they also were an interesting description that I think would be easily understood.

You could imagine what that would be.

And it also implies one thing about her as it's very womanly.

And the other is that it feels southern too.

To me, it's like regional perfume.

I don't think of it as New York perfume, you know, I think of it as Southern.

Yeah, that country Maine is not a perfumed accent.

Yeah, it feels like it's Texas, which is where it was set.

In my mind.

You wrote that lyric here, yeah, And.

That's why Edie's voice, which it serves, serves the song in several ways that are powerful.

I think first of all, you're not expecting to hear another voice come in on the record.

That has only been me and the guitars so far, so it's a surprise and Edie is from Texas, and she sings great no matter what she does.

She's one of those people that you know, has perfect pitch and sings in tune all the time.

It's very end of your But she's also naturally inhabits that character.

So to me, she sounds like like that character.

And it's really the two of us in a pickup truck, which she drives anyway, so she was the right person to tell that story.

And her accent is like that.

It is that sort of soft Southern accent.

So it's a little play.

It's a little play that's going on there with different characters and the sometimes, like when when she's introduced with her lines hurry gets yourself inside the truck to the to the hitchhikers when it's raining, the both of us sing that line.

I'm singing harmony to her, but I fade out my voice somewhere in the middle of the first sentence, so it's sort of my voice introduces this character, but it doesn't stay for the convey mention a length of time, which is a lot one line or something.

It's not a usual duet form.

It's a sound that comes and then disappears.

That's like a lot of sounds on this record.

They appear and they disappear, and then the listener says, what was that?

More hopefully they say that it's meant to be the way we observe and the way we think.

We don't think in four bars or eight bars.

We think with no bar lines.

Things come in and they go away.

And that's what I was trying to do with the writing, and that song is a good example of me trying to do that.

You never considered anyone but Eadie for that.

Oh no, I never thought anybody else would would do that.

Were you thinking of her even as you first wrote the lyrics.

I think once I put the other character in there, I knew it would be it would be Edie and Edie and I.

We haven't done it on record, but we've sung a lot in harmony, and like what many years ago, Edie wrote these songs when our kids were little, and she used to take them to the park and the stroller.

She would make up songs while they were in the stroller on the swing, and they were great songs, really simple, great, you know the kids could sing along with, but beautiful.

We did she ever record those?

We recorded them, Oh you did.

Yeah, so I know that we sing well together.

We have a good, very good blend.

So Edie was always that character.

And then in Wait she also fits that another character.

That voice that comes in it was like sort of angelic.

And it also fits Edie's voice because it's a voice that can go a lot in a lot of places.

Her natural inclination is to be a little bit bluesy, you know, she let her notes sort of fall off, and but in this case she's just singing in this voice that's I don't know who that voice is, you know, I mean, there would be the cliche would be it would be like an angel's voice, you know.

I mean, I wouldn't say that, but that's cliche.

Can you play any any bit of the music for Sacred Heart?

Yeah?

I can play a little bit of the guitar I forgot.

I forgot some of it.

But you know, again, this is of no interest to all but a tiny fortunate people.

But this interval is an unusual interval in songs.

It's for those who are musicians.

It's a flat fifth or sharp fourth.

That interval.

You don't hear it often.

The most famous example of it is.

Do Marie, do do that that?

That's otherwise you don't hear that too often.

It's not an easy interval to sing.

Naturally, A fifth is natural?

Are you going this scarboroughfare?

You here fifths all the time?

Why did you use the unusual one here?

Because it's uh, it's unusual and interesting.

It's interesting too, it's interesting to the ear.

But mm hmm, change of moods the summer stone.

You raised the song this guy.

Two happless Cittackers wire singly Nuts as we were cruising by.

Why when I said that was my favorite song, you said that's my favorite song too.

Why is it your favorite song?

Well?

I love the duet.

I really liked the story.

I like the way the voices come in and the way they dance with each other.

I like that little interval.

I liked her voice of blend of regional perfumes.

I like the way the mist turns from what she says in the beginning, the rain will turn to mist with any luck, and you can find a place to stay.

That's what she says to the hitchhikers when they get in, because she's like, we the drivers of the pickup feel bad that it's pouring rain.

But we're really not in the mood for hitchhikers.

So it's like we're come on in, but we're not going far.

So we're telling you now, it's not a long ride, you know, it's the rain will stop.

You can go and find a place to stay.

At the end of the story, the ringing strings, the thought that God turns music into bliss, we left to pick up in the driveway the moon.

The moon appeared as amber and the mist, so that the mist becomes another meaning from the first time it's used.

Things like that as a songwriter are satisfying because it came together.

I'm always trying to make it come together, but doesn't It doesn't happen all the time.

The emotional range in that song is what I was was what you're alluding to now, is that's what drew me.

We have the generosity mixed with reluctance, which is a you know, one kind of emotion.

We meet these two people and they're broken, these kids, they're like on the ruts there, and then we end on this kind of with the beauty of that image of the mist.

I mean, it's like this song in what I was saying, the efficient I mean efficiency is a terrible word to use here, but the idea that in a in that compact segment, you can range through these this variety of emotions and make us feel all of those things that you're going.

Well, you say they're broken, they appear to be broken.

You know.

My boy and may wear refugees of sorts from my hometown.

They're all like different there.

They would have modis down, modus down, you know, like weeds.

So they seem like they're broken.

He doesn't talk much anymore, just to the voices in his head.

But really they're seekers of spiritual bliss.

You know, the sacred horror that David played to make his songs of praise.

We long to hear those strings that set as hard a blaze.

They're the enlightened pair.

Really, it's an interesting story.

I thought, Oh, it's it's it's it's gorgeous, it's it's odd.

It's the one that I mean, it's someone who was raising the church.

It's it's the one.

It's the song.

It's the most kind of explicitly biblical.

It's a yeah, really you could turn that into a hymn.

It could be sung in a church.

I get a lot of pleasure of somebody.

If that was if it did find its way into that environment, I'd like.

That that would give you a lot of pleasure because they would recognize it.

I like when songs go to different places.

I like it when different communities of people hear something that they identify within a song.

It means that you can read different things into it, and it's something that as a songwriter, you would hope to achieve that.

It's that something would appeal to many, many people on a personal level, and that personal interpretation would be quite different along the spectrum of the of the listeners.

That would be a successful song.

And it happens naturally with every song because as I've said, as we said, and when we had our long conversation, one of the things was that I believe that the listener completes the song.

They hear it, They take in the meaning on a personal level may not be the meaning that I intended.

They even change the words in their mind.

When people sometimes repeat the words that there are their favorite words to me of the songs, it's not what I wrote, but it's what they heard.

That's what it is.

That's what the listener completes the song.

So if this song was sung in an environment that it was a church environment, it would have a certain a certain kind of meaning.

If it was sung in a different place, it would have a different, different meaning.

That's good.

It's good because it does.

It does have a choice of meanings.

Was the production of this record different than previous records?

Were you more?

Was it more exhaustive?

No?

No, no, it was the same.

It's the same.

This was just a different animal, that's all.

It's not exhausting anyway.

It's not exhausting, and I don't get bored with doing things over and over and over again.

It's not even the thought that enters my mind this is boring.

It's you're searching for something that you can hear, but you haven't.

I haven't attained yet, so you really get interested in the in the pursuit.

It's not boring.

It's not exhausting at all.

It's I mean, it's really when you're hot on the trail, it's really exhilarating.

And it's part of what makes me like to do this and why I've spent my whole life doing it.

I really enjoy it, and when I get it right for myself, then I get a little blast of dopamine in my brain and I'm addicted.

I want it again.

Thanks to Paul Simon for taking us behind the making of his newest album, Seven Songs.

Be sure to check out the audio original Miracle and Wonder Conversations with Paul Simon to hear more about Paul's a brilliant career.

You can find it at audible dot com or at pushkin dot fm.

And again, we're releasing a new version of that book, along with a brand new chapter about Seven Psalms this fall.

You can hear Paul's new album Seven Psalms, along with all of our favorite songs of his on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com.

You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes.

Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Ben Talliday, Nisha Venkat, Jordan McMillan, and Eric Sandler.

Our editor is Sophie Crane.

Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries.

If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus.

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Our the Music exp by Kenny Beats.

I'm justin Richmond.