Happy Birthday Paul Simon, 70 Today

Happy Birthday to Paul Simon! We’re celebrating his 70th birthday today with a stream of “Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.” Listen to the track below and check out these liner notes written by Tom Moon for “Songwriter,” in stores October 24th:

On one level, Simon’s songbook can be appreciated as the journey of a restless songwriter searching for new ways to communicate, driven toward new musical settings for his ideas. This quest became all-consuming with Graceland, Simon’s masterful 1986 conversation between the music of South Africa and the American South. As before, Simon began by exploring the essence of the rhythms – he’s said that he spent a few years deeply obsessed by African music before he started to analyze it. He got inside the “flow” of the rhythm and pulled from it melodies that effortlessly bridge old and new worlds – and then found images and story fragments that seem to spring, organically, from the atmosphere.

Paul Simon – Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes by Legacy Recordings