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There are two types of songs (this may well apply to any kind of art, whether poems, stories, paintings, sculpture, etc.):

1) something that seems cobbled together, a bit forced, constructed like a piece of furniture

2) something that seems to have popped out of nowhere organically, something that seems to have grown, like a flower or a fruit.

All the songs on Paul’s new NEW album, I hate to say, seem to fall in the category of #1.

A songwriter knows when a song he is writing, or has written, is one or the other.  As good as some of the #1 songs can be, they always seem a bit forced, and about the best of them, one can sense the nails and screws just under the surface holding them together.  That doesn’t mean they can’t be quite cool and fun — to play or to listen to.  At any rate, I feel blessed that I have created a few songs that feel like a #2.

Although it’s somewhat subjective, I think one can recognize the songs by a particular artist that seem like the “Muse” just hit him and he didn’t have to engage in a lot of patchwork and hammering nails just to plug the leaks, so to speak.

Here are my picks — just an incomplete list — of those types of songs for Paul Simon (solo years):

Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard

Kodachrome

Was a Sunny Day

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

Diamonds in the Soles of My Shoes

You Can Call Me Al

(Though one of my favorite songs of his is “I Do It For Your Love” I can’t quite say it’s one of this type of song — I suspect if anything, it’s a hybrid of the two types: he had a flash of inspiration with a melody or two and a few chords, then he began to weave it together with intellectual effort into a whole with beginning and end and middle.  The finished product is great, but it still feels a bit artificial here and there and you can see the seams, so to speak.)

When I’m working on a song and it’s “under construction”, it often runs through my mind during the day, and/or I sing (or hum) parts of it to myself.  In this process, many little variations come to mind — almost feels like the various water rivulets and branches of a mountain stream finding its “true nature” as the form it will become amid the terrain it’s carving as the vessel of that form, so to speak.  I’m always aware, however, that “more is not necessarily better” and sometimes “less is more”.  On the other hand, I don’t want to suppress the creative flow while it’s going on, in case some flash happens that is worth keeping.  Often as this goes on over time, certain of the variations that keep coming back to me I can tell are keepers.

However, there’s another dynamic afoot here: as a musician, I strongly believe that a song should have variations and curlicues to its basic pattern.  I often am annoyed when songwriters out there fashion a song with a certain structure, but they never deviate from any parts of it when they repeat the refrain or the chorus etc.  So I consciously try to figure out deviations to do — they don’t have to be flashy; they can just be subtle.  But more importantly, they should feel right, musically. 

So I’ve got a song I’m working on how that’s in a sub-genre one could call “tavern songs” or “Irish shanties”, with a strong folkish feel.  This sub-genre being traditional sounding carries a strong pressure to be boilerplate and not have lots of variation.  All the more reason to break the rules, I say.