Fact #117535
When:
Short story:
Still Crazy After All These Years by Paul Simon enters the Billboard album charts in the USA, on its way to No1.
Full article:
Paul Simon: I know who that is (the lover in Still Crazy After All These Years). It's good to start with something that's true. If you start with something that's false, you're always covering your tracks. Something simple and true, that has a lot of possibilities, is a nice way to begin. Sometimes these are second verses and I say, ‘Oh, that's really not a second verse, it's a first verse.’ In Still Crazy After All These Years, that [title] came to me first. And it didn't come with melody, either. It just came as a line. And then I had to create a story.
It’s probably the most famous ballad I wrote after Simon And Garfunkel. The title came to me when I was stepping into a shower. And I wasn't very happy about it. I didn't say, ‘Oh, that's clever, that's a good one, I can use that.’ It was, at the time, an assessment of where I was at in my life. And I wasn't very happy that that was my assessment. But I soon turned it into a song and that's what you do with those things. In a way it's amazing that it appears I originated that. I seem so idiomatic but I don't think there was any ‘still crazy after all these years’ before that.
The title has the kind of catchiness that country music titles have. You get the whole story in the title. People relate to their own lives immediately just from the title. There are very few other of my titles that are catchy in that way.
It's a title about which I've often thought - did I make that up? It seems like it's such a familiar phrase. We've seen it in so many permutations - still this after all these years, still that after all these years. Like 50 ways to do this, or bridge over that. So that came as a phrase and the melody at the same time.
The song is a bit darker than people think. Because the chorus and the phrase are so suggestive of a long time passing, it has a touch of the Auld Lang Syne to it. I don't think people pay attention to the lyrics of the song, which makes me feel I probably wrote the wrong lyric to it. The lyrics wasn't about the title, or only in a typically oblique, obscured fashion. It's almost like that thing that happened to Bruce Springsteen with Born In The USA, which became some patriotic, punch your fist in the air song when it was actually the complete opposite.
I was studying with a bass player and composer named Chuck Israels at the time so I was doing more interesting changes. I was studying harmony with him.
It was kind of an exercise that I did, which was to try and get every note from a twelve-tone scale into the song. So what would happen is that I would cover most of the notes in the song and there would be maybe three notes that you couldn't get into the scale of the key you were using. And those three notes were really the key to the bridge. Usually it would be a tritone away from whatever key you were using. If you were in the key of C, the farthest away you can go is F#. That's the key that's the least related to C.
Instead of using a minor chord I use a major chord and go up a step. It is hard to get an interesting key change. I also like to write a bridge and just jump a whole tone up. Still Crazy has that.
But whatever, the song had interesting chord changes and Bob James's arrangement was extraordinary. The saxophone solo became famous. Michael Brecker, who's just a jazz guy, always begins the solo on tour the way he did on the original version, and he came through one day and he said, ‘Look I hope you don't think that I can't think of anything. I can think of a lot of things, but I think it's such a well-known solo that I always think I have to start off by quoting it and then going wherever I want to go.’ There was a nice recording of this by Ray Charles.
50 Ways To Leave Your Lover has a real casualness to the verses and a sense of humour to it, and the choruses are funny and catchy. And everybody seemed to like that one, young people and old people. The choruses were from a rhyming game I used to play with my son Harper when he was about four. I think it came off unusually well as a record. I like the chords. The big discovery was Steve Gadd's drum part. It's probably what made it a hit.
Phil Ramone (producer) : Paul was screwing around with a little drum-machine, mixing a samba with some other beat. At the time, Steve Gadd was out in the studio warming up, doing military paradiddles, and Paul just loved it. That just changed the whole groove of the song.
Paul Simon : It's tricky; I've watched a lot of drummers try to play that. They never quite get it. It's very tricky.
Phil Ramone : Gone At Last was a great lesson for me and for Paul. It started out as a song that had been recorded tooslow. We tried to fix it and fix it, then finally he looked at me and said, ‘We should never do this. We should just re-cut that track.’ And that was the method in which Pauland I worked from there on out. e went back and re-cut it live, but we laugh at that now, because we both knew that we cut it too fast, after struggling with it being so slow.
Paul Simon : I wrote Have A Good Time for the film Shampoo but it never got in. Still Crazy, also, I tried to get in. Warren (Beatty) didn't want to use it. I think it would have been good for the film. I wrote it in this time signature - the verses are in 7/8 and the chorus in 4/4. But it's played very smoothly because Steve Gadd smoothed it out and gave it that feel. I like that song. It has a nice opening line. That was a funny song, too. It was meant to be funny. Dave Matthews wrote the horn part, which is great. He's a premiere horn writer; he used to do great brass charts for James Brown. The Phil Woods sax solo at the end was either a first or a second take. I think he did two takes and they were both just incredible. He was in and out of the studio in twenty minutes.
Gone At Last is a very happy song. It was originally a duet with Bette Midler but it didn't work out. It was a different track, a Latin-based track. The track just didn't happen. Once I knew it was not going to work out, I thought of Phoebe Snow. She just had her first album out - Poetry Man. I thought she blew me off the record. I thought she was great. I don't have a voice that's gospel, certainly not for an uptempo gospel song. But that track - and Phoebe - really cook. One of the reasons I included it here was for the [ piano ] playing of Richard Tee, who is just phenomenal on that track and on everything he plays.
(Source : not known)
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It’s probably the most famous ballad I wrote after Simon And Garfunkel. The title came to me when I was stepping into a shower. And I wasn't very happy about it. I didn't say, ‘Oh, that's clever, that's a good one, I can use that.’ It was, at the time, an assessment of where I was at in my life. And I wasn't very happy that that was my assessment. But I soon turned it into a song and that's what you do with those things. In a way it's amazing that it appears I originated that. I seem so idiomatic but I don't think there was any ‘still crazy after all these years’ before that.
The title has the kind of catchiness that country music titles have. You get the whole story in the title. People relate to their own lives immediately just from the title. There are very few other of my titles that are catchy in that way.
It's a title about which I've often thought - did I make that up? It seems like it's such a familiar phrase. We've seen it in so many permutations - still this after all these years, still that after all these years. Like 50 ways to do this, or bridge over that. So that came as a phrase and the melody at the same time.
The song is a bit darker than people think. Because the chorus and the phrase are so suggestive of a long time passing, it has a touch of the Auld Lang Syne to it. I don't think people pay attention to the lyrics of the song, which makes me feel I probably wrote the wrong lyric to it. The lyrics wasn't about the title, or only in a typically oblique, obscured fashion. It's almost like that thing that happened to Bruce Springsteen with Born In The USA, which became some patriotic, punch your fist in the air song when it was actually the complete opposite.
I was studying with a bass player and composer named Chuck Israels at the time so I was doing more interesting changes. I was studying harmony with him.
It was kind of an exercise that I did, which was to try and get every note from a twelve-tone scale into the song. So what would happen is that I would cover most of the notes in the song and there would be maybe three notes that you couldn't get into the scale of the key you were using. And those three notes were really the key to the bridge. Usually it would be a tritone away from whatever key you were using. If you were in the key of C, the farthest away you can go is F#. That's the key that's the least related to C.
Instead of using a minor chord I use a major chord and go up a step. It is hard to get an interesting key change. I also like to write a bridge and just jump a whole tone up. Still Crazy has that.
But whatever, the song had interesting chord changes and Bob James's arrangement was extraordinary. The saxophone solo became famous. Michael Brecker, who's just a jazz guy, always begins the solo on tour the way he did on the original version, and he came through one day and he said, ‘Look I hope you don't think that I can't think of anything. I can think of a lot of things, but I think it's such a well-known solo that I always think I have to start off by quoting it and then going wherever I want to go.’ There was a nice recording of this by Ray Charles.
50 Ways To Leave Your Lover has a real casualness to the verses and a sense of humour to it, and the choruses are funny and catchy. And everybody seemed to like that one, young people and old people. The choruses were from a rhyming game I used to play with my son Harper when he was about four. I think it came off unusually well as a record. I like the chords. The big discovery was Steve Gadd's drum part. It's probably what made it a hit.
Phil Ramone (producer) : Paul was screwing around with a little drum-machine, mixing a samba with some other beat. At the time, Steve Gadd was out in the studio warming up, doing military paradiddles, and Paul just loved it. That just changed the whole groove of the song.
Paul Simon : It's tricky; I've watched a lot of drummers try to play that. They never quite get it. It's very tricky.
Phil Ramone : Gone At Last was a great lesson for me and for Paul. It started out as a song that had been recorded tooslow. We tried to fix it and fix it, then finally he looked at me and said, ‘We should never do this. We should just re-cut that track.’ And that was the method in which Pauland I worked from there on out. e went back and re-cut it live, but we laugh at that now, because we both knew that we cut it too fast, after struggling with it being so slow.
Paul Simon : I wrote Have A Good Time for the film Shampoo but it never got in. Still Crazy, also, I tried to get in. Warren (Beatty) didn't want to use it. I think it would have been good for the film. I wrote it in this time signature - the verses are in 7/8 and the chorus in 4/4. But it's played very smoothly because Steve Gadd smoothed it out and gave it that feel. I like that song. It has a nice opening line. That was a funny song, too. It was meant to be funny. Dave Matthews wrote the horn part, which is great. He's a premiere horn writer; he used to do great brass charts for James Brown. The Phil Woods sax solo at the end was either a first or a second take. I think he did two takes and they were both just incredible. He was in and out of the studio in twenty minutes.
Gone At Last is a very happy song. It was originally a duet with Bette Midler but it didn't work out. It was a different track, a Latin-based track. The track just didn't happen. Once I knew it was not going to work out, I thought of Phoebe Snow. She just had her first album out - Poetry Man. I thought she blew me off the record. I thought she was great. I don't have a voice that's gospel, certainly not for an uptempo gospel song. But that track - and Phoebe - really cook. One of the reasons I included it here was for the [ piano ] playing of Richard Tee, who is just phenomenal on that track and on everything he plays.
(Source : not known)