Paul Simon is 83 years old. He’s been a musical titan for my entire life. A 16-time Grammy winner and an Album of the Year recipient three times. A Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee (twice). Half of one of pop music’s most iconic duos. He’s been a producer, an actor, a Saturday Night Live staple as both host and musical act. He’s done a lot.

Still, Simon is one of those artists whose notable genius has, for one reason or another, slipped past me. He’s still known (perhaps, among an older crowd, mainly known) for his early Simon & Garfunkel stuff; Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Sound of Silence, Feelin’ Groovy (The 59th Street Bridge Song), the ’60s and ’70s folksie tunes that put him on the popular music map. Up-tempo stuff like Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard. Songs, honestly, that don’t make a whole lot of Spotify playlists these days.

But boy, relegating Simon to what he accomplished 50 years ago — 60 years ago, even as good as those songs are — would be selling him way short.

Few artists in my lifetime have experimented so successfully with so many types of music as Simon has during a recording career that began in 1957. I don’t necessarily mean his turns in folk or country or pop or rock n’ roll or rhythm and blues, although he’s taken credible cracks at all of those. More, Simon has gone to great lengths, traveled many miles, to bring things like South African music (in his 1986 masterpiece album, Graceland) and Brazilian sounds (1990, The Rhythm of the Saints) to the American mainstream. He’s dabbled in zydeco and reggae and soul. He can handle a ballad in any genre, even with a voice that, to be honest, probably is not Hall of Fame material.

It’s impossible to listen to many of Simon’s songs — early career, mid-career, even on Seven Psalms, his 15th studio album and probably his last, which he released in 2023 — and not appreciate the rhythms, the percussive feel, the harmonies, the clear ear of someone who has successfully grown from one-time musical prodigy to American musical legend.

As good as the music is, though — and, from Me and Julio to modern-day, many of them are sing-along, smile-along awesome — I’ve always been a sucker for lyrics (check the tags and the headline on these posts, for goodness sake). And Simon’s verses put him among American songwriting royalty.

The thing is, I don’t understand all of his lyrics. (What really happened down by the schoolyard?) I’m not sure they all make sense. I’m not sure they’re supposed to. I’m pretty sure that, plenty of times, he’s just messing with us.

That’s kind of the beauty of Paul Simon.

“I really don’t know what exactly all the songs mean. Sometimes other people have meanings and when I hear them, I think, ‘That’s really a better meaning than I thought and perfectly valid given the words that exist,'” he told musician and journalist Paul Zollo in 2011. “So part of what makes a song really good is that people take in different meanings, and they apply them and they might be more powerful than the ones I’m thinking.”

Well, what about that? A guy who starts out to write something and often has no idea of where he’s going.

My kind of writer.

To me, what marks Simon’s lyrics above all else is their humor. Not in every song, certainly. It’s hard to find a chuckle in Hello darkness, my old friend (The Sounds of Silence). Still, Simon regularly throws a funny line, a funny-sounding line, a trademark smile-inducing rhyme, into even his deepest of songs. His 1972 song Mother and Child Reunion has some dark undertones, at least to those who purport to understand it, but Simon took the winking title from a dish in a restaurant that included both chicken and egg.

Simon sat down for an interview with Stephen Colbert recently — a wonderful interview, well worth watching, here — and in it recounted his 1999 song Darling Lorraine. It was a song, he told Colbert, that almost immediately took off in a different direction than he intended. And it ended up as a touching, bittersweet look at the arc of a long marriage.

Early on in the song, Simon makes fun of a classic rock n’ roll trope about being a man of the road. It snakes around from there:

All my life I’ve been a wanderer
Not really, I mostly lived near my parents’ home
Anyway, Lorraine and I got married
And the usual marriage stuff
Then one day she says to me
From out of the blue
She says, “Frank, I’ve had enough
Romance is a heartbreaker
I’m not meant to be a homemaker
And I’m tired of being darling Lorraine

What–you don’t love me anymore?
What–you’re walking out the door?
What–you don’t like the way I chew?
Hey, let me tell you
You’re not the woman that I wed
You say you’re depressed but you’re not
You just like to stay in bed
I don’t need you, darling Lorraine

The song carries on, showcasing the give and take, the push and shove of a marriage. Honestly, it’s not one of my favorite songs. But the lyrics and that largely unexpected bittersweet end make it a worthwhile listen.

Lyrics are always ripe for interpretative picking. There’s an entire site out there called songmeanings.com, and an entire blog that breaks down the secret message behind every Simon song, ever, at paulsimonsongs.blogspot.com. But when you take into consideration that the lyricist himself is sometimes unsure of the intent of his lyrics — Simon has said, “I’m more interested in what I discover than what I invent” — well, it’s probably best to not get too attached to meaning.

Mr. Beerbelly, Beerbelly
Get these mutts away from me
You know I don’t find this stuff
Amusing anymore

Those lyrics are from You Can Call Me Al (all of his lyrics to all of his songs are on his site), one of Simon’s most commercially successful songs. The true meaning of the lyrics isn’t clear. Simon has said he and his wife were mis-introduced at a party, which he found funny (I can call you Betty/And Betty, when you call me/You can call me Al). From there, maybe as it should be, the meaning behind the lyrics (other than the dead obvious) is all speculation.

One piece of clarity: As Simon intended, evident in the stupid, super well-know video with Chevy Chase, the lyrics are meant to be fun.

He says, ‘Why am I short of attention?
Got a short little span of attention
And, woe my nights are so long
Where’s my wife and family?
What if I die here?
Who’ll be my role model
Now that my role model is
Gone gone?‘

“The only thought that I give to it is: ‘Is that something that I really believe?’ It doesn’t have to be insightful or anything. It just has to be not a lie. I can’t say, ‘I’m setting out to write a really deep, philosophical song.’ I would never say that. I have no idea,” he told Zollo.

Certainly, Simon has some lyrics that, in concert with the music, forego the fooling around and smack you right in the mug with their truthfulness. Train in the Distance is another piece about a love affair, a marriage gone wrong, with another gut-wrenching ending:

Now the man and the woman, they remain in contact
Let us say it’s for the child
With disagreements about the meaning of a marriage contract
Conversations hard and wild

But from time to time, he makes her laugh
She cooks a meal of two
Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance
Everybody thinks it’s true
Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance
Everybody thinks it’s true

What is the point of this story?
What information pertains
The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly
Into our hearts
And our brains

Or the excellent Slip Slidin’ Away:

And I know a father
Who had a son
He longed to tell him all the reasons
For the things he’d done
He came a long way
Just to explain
He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping
Then he turned around and headed home again

Slip slidin’ away
Slip slidin’ away
You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away

And that one ends — I can’t not put the ending on this — with a Simon truth bomb, searing in its simplicity.

God only knows
God makes his plan
The information’s unavailable
To the mortal man
We’re working our jobs
Collect our pay
Believe we’re gliding down the highway
When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away

I was re-introduced to Simon a few years ago watching the Edgar Wright-directed movie Baby Driver. Filmed in Atlanta (The ATL was practically a character in it), the 2017 movie centered on a young, partially deaf professional getaway man named Baby. It was a comedy-thriller with, like many Wright films, a killer soundtrack.

The end credits were rolling, and the title song’s first strums starting, before I recognized that the title for the film is the same as a smile-inducing, sing-in-the-car tune that is quintessentially Simon, first recorded with his partner Garfunkel on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album in 1970.

Don’t understand it much at all. Probably wasn’t meant to. And that’s OK.

My daddy was a prominent frogman
My mamma’s in the Naval Reserve
When I was young, I carried a gun
But I never got the chance to serve
I did not serve

Whatever that song means, I think it’s fair to say that, like a lot of rock n’ roll, it has a lot to do with sex.

I wonder how your engines feel

I think the lesson in listening to Simon songs, probably much as it was with Simon penning the verses, is to simply go with the flow. Enjoy the music. Dive into the lyrics. Revel in the trip that this amazing artist has taken us on for so, so long. And don’t sweat the small stuff.

“The more you do it,” Simon told Zollo, about his writing, “the luckier you get.”

I hear you now, Paul Simon.