Recordings
Paul Simon still restless after all these years
Paul Simon's a restless guy. Even after all the millions of record sales and a dozen Grammy awards, he remains a connoisseur of the exotic, a sound collector who happens to write songs. On “Stranger to Stranger” (Concord), his 13th solo album, he blends the fancifully titled cloud-chamber bowls and chromelodeons of maverick composer Harry Partch with an army of globe-spanning musicians into off-kilter pop songs.
By way of introduction, the reverberating twang of a one-string gopichand melds into the sound of a wolf howl. “The Werewolf” shakes, rattles and shimmies on a river of percussion. Murder is in the air, but there's an almost knowing slyness in Simon's conversational delivery, delighting in what appears to be the imminent comeuppance of “the winners, the grinners with money-colored eyes.”
“Wristband” rides upright bass and scat singing. It grooves even as it turns a casually funny vignette about show-biz bureaucracy into something far more serious and ominous.
There's a legit reason for the prayer that asks for “Proof of Love.” God was a major character in Simon's previous album, “So Beautiful or So What,” and mortality hovers near the surface of these songs. Simon's narrators question the point of it all and sometimes find solace with another lost soul, as in the luminous title track.
Yet even in the seemingly lighthearted “Cool Papa Bell,” heaven seems a long way away — 6 trillion light years, to be precise. There's the dreaded late -phone call and pointless death in “The Riverbank,” and one crisis after another exploding in the bustle of an emergency room evoked by “In a Parade.”
The wolf introduced in the album's opening seconds becomes a sheep in the closing “Insomniac's Lullaby.” Amid the police sirens from the street below and the Partch swirl of sound inside his head, the narrator tosses and turns. But he doesn't sound all that upset. As Simon sings in “Proof of Love,” when words fail, “music is the tongue I speak.”
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