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Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Hear Music Records
Released: 2011.04.08
Time:
 38:15
Category: Worldbeat, Pop, Rock, Folk
Producer(s): Phil Ramone, Paul Simon
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.paulsimon.com
Appears with: Simon & Garfunkel
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





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[1] Getting Ready for Christmas Day (P.Simon) - 4:06
[2] The Afterlife (P.Simon) - 3:40
[3] Dazzling Blue (P.Simon) - 4:32
[4] Rewrite (P.Simon) - 3:49
[5] Love and Hard Times (P.Simon) - 4:09
[6] Love Is Eternal Sacred Light (P.Simon) - 4:02
[7] Amulet (P.Simon) - 1:36
[8] Questions for the Angels (P.Simon) - 3:49
[9] Love & Blessings (P.Simon) - 4:18
[10] So Beautiful or So What (P.Simon) - 4:07

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Paul Simon - Bells, Glockenspiel, Percussion, Producer, Vocals, Whistle, Twelve-String- Acoustic- Electric & Nylon String Guitar

Chris Bear - Electronics & Introduction
David Finck - Bass
Vincent Nguini - Acoustic & Electric Guitar
Jim Oblon - Bass, Drums, Electric & Slide Guitar, Percussion
Steve Shehan - Angklung, Bass, Brushes, Crotale, Cymbals, Djembe, Glass Harp, Resonator, Saz, Stick & Talking Drum
Mick Rossi - Piano
Joshua Swift - Dobro
Nancy Zeltsman - Marimba

Edie Brickell - Background Vocals
Doyle Lawson - Background Vocals
Lulu Simon - Background Vocals

Desiree Elsevier - Viola
Skip La Plante - Gong, Harp & Wind Chimes
Jeanne Leblanc - Celli
Vincent Lionti - Viola
Richard Locker - Celli
Lois Martin - Viola

Mary Abt - Clarinet
Charles Pillow - Clarinet
Sara Cutler - Flute & Harp
Steve Gorn - Bansuri
Diane Lesser - Horn
Elizabeth Mann - Flute
Yacouba Sissoko - Kora
Pamela Sklar - Flute
Etienne Stadwijk - Celeste
Dr. Michael White - Clarinet
Gabe Witcher - Fiddle
Karaikudi R. Mani - Ensemble & Vocal Percussion
Gil Goldstein - Arranger

Phil Ramone - Mixing & Producer
Andy Smith - Engineer
Greg Calbi - Mastering
Geoff Gans - Art Direction & Design
Sven Geier - Cover Image
Kevin Mazur - Band Photo
Mark Seliger - Photography
Elvis Costello - Liner Notes

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Touted as Paul Simon’s return to traditional songwriting -- Simon writing alone with a guitar and a pen instead of constructing songs around rhythmic loops the way he’s done since Graceland -- So Beautiful or So What doesn’t feel like a return to the ‘70s. From the moment the record kicks in with the heavy blues stomp and samples of “Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” it’s evident that while Simon may have changed his style of composing, he’s not abandoning his method of record-making, which is distinctly engaged with the present. When Bob Dylan sings about Alicia Keys he does so with an old-fashioned swing, but when Simon writes a verse about Jay-Z he does it within the context of an album anchored in polyrhythms, chattering guitars, and digital loops, where the handful of delicate acoustic numbers function as a counterpoint to the clean bustle of the rest of the record. Certainly, So Beautiful or So What isn’t as reliant on soundscapes as its Brian Eno-produced predecessor, but it is no rejection of texture, just as it is in no way a repudiation of the musical sensibility of Graceland, whose rhythms are as firmly felt here as on any record he’s made since. Rather, So Beautiful elegantly touches upon each of Simon’s solo signatures within a compact 38 minutes, its brevity indicating the precision of Simon’s focus. There are no wasted sounds or words here, and if he offers some of his simplest, prettiest tunes in years (“Love & Hard Times,” “Amulet”) and spends a considerable chunk of the record dwelling on spiritual matters, the album is neither steeped in nostalgia nor haunted by death. Paul Simon is remarkably clear-eyed in assessing the modern world and his place in it, not shying away from contemporary sounds -- if anything, the production is occasionally a tad too brittle, like so many digital-age recordings -- but not chasing after youth either. He’s merely living in his time and reporting, returning with an album that’s vivid, vibrant, and current in a way none of his peers have managed to achieve.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



Paul Simon is dead and awaiting a glimpse of the divine. He's filled out the form and he's stood in the queue. The anteroom of the beyond, it turns out, is rather like the endless bureaucratic interzone of the living – at least on the second track on Simon's 12th solo album, a song called "The Afterlife". Eventually, Simon arrives in the presence of the Almighty. Attempting to describe the feeling, he flounders, unable to render the experience except as "a fragment of song". "A be-bop-a-lula," he offers, "Oh papa do." Pop's glossolalia frequently covers for more base acts than that of meeting one's maker, but here, Simon manages to grapple with mortality, spirituality and even banality, finding an answer to the ineffable in song. Rhymin' Simon at (nearly) 70? Still good, then.

Simon's first album in five years, So Beautiful or so What, examines the big issues with a lightness of touch, both in his lyrics and musical approach – a process the "songwriter-singer" (his preference) has refined over the course of five decades. Bombs explode in marketplaces and sons fight in far-off lands in these 10 songs, but these are passing references, tributaries to the flow of human mystery that Simon is attempting to chart.

He's ambivalent about Christmas on the album opener, "Getting Ready for Christmas Day", pondering both the wallet strain and "the power and the glory of the story". So Beautiful finds his wit characteristically dry and his heart sopping wet. "The Cat scan's eye sees what the heart's concealing," runs "Dazzling Blue", before its narrator turns romantic, marvelling that "you and I were born beneath a star of dazzling blue" and pondering marriage. There are three songs whose titles begin with the word "love"; the most urgent, "Love Is Eternal Sacred Light" reimagines the Big Bang as a kaleidoscopic effusion of colour. Later, the voice of God scoffs at the very phrase, then ruefully notes that no one can ever tell when He's joking.

As you might expect from the maker of Graceland, "Dazzling Blue" has African cadences playing off against Asian tablas; "Rewrite" opens with a flurry of kora, the Malian harp. The cumulative effect of this exotic instrumentation alongside Simon's guitar is breeziness, a spring aided by some milkman whistling and a relative lack of bass notes. And it swings, too. Simon's lyrics have been so obsessively examined that his unerring sense of propulsion is sometimes forgotten. So Beautiful clocks in at a lean and succinct 36 minutes and it ripples with momentum, even on "Amulet", a relatively sober instrumental.

A great many of Simon's contemporaries – Dylan and Neil Young, to name but two – have grappled with the most un-rock'n'roll business of growing older and taking stock. In turns playful and gently profound, Simon doesn't regard the future with dread or the past with regret. He re-emphasises the need for love, a good time and a sense of perspective. When we are all gone, he notes three-quarters of the way through this lustrous record, no zebra will shed a tear.

Kitty Empire - 12 June 2011
© 2015 Guardian News



On Graceland, "the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio"; it's a "bomb in the marketplace" on So Beautiful or So What. The shift in strategy is minor, but those rhyming images speak to the 25 years separating these two albums: 1986 could be eons ago, or it could be yesterday. Those were the days of miracles and wonder, as Paul Simon entered his forties with humor and curiosity intact. These days, however, haven't been too kind: Even as his influence has grown, his output has suffered. After opening the millennium with the dull-by-obligation You're the One, he hired Brian Eno for 2006's Surprise, whose true surprise was that one of the most careful and rigid pop songwriters of the last 50 years could be just as rambling and self-indulgent as any other aging Baby Boomer.

To his considerable credit, however, Simon has never succumbed to a record with Rick Rubin or a Great American Songbook album, perhaps because his standards aren't pre-rock pop tunes. While there was a period when his South African and Brazilian excursions in the late 1980s were derided as exploitative, both Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints have proved enormously influential to a new generation of indie-pop songwriters from the Shins' James Mercer to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig. Simon, who turns 70 this year, is still forging his own path even this deep into his career and remains devoted to and fascinated by old R&B, gospel, and world music. So Beautiful or So What blends them all into a pop sound that's simultaneously laidback and spry, almost self-consciously alluding to his past triumphs.

Replacing Brian Eno, long-time cohort Phil Ramone co-produces, and the pairing is comfortable, if not complacent. They've corralled a small band to suggest a live-in-the-room intimacy and spontaneity, and "Rewrite" and "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light" crackle with energy. Some of the ambient elements from Surprise remain, but they're couched in the earthy rhythms of the percussion and the spidery guitars. His voice still strong, Simon shows off his own fretwork more prominently, especially on the short, sweet instrumental "Amulet". Only the sampled sermon on "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" sounds out of place; contemporary listeners may be more likely to connect it to Moby's pre-millennial techno-folk than to its true source material, a 1941 sermon by Reverend J.M. Gates.

Even as his band gets smaller, Simon's ideas grow larger. He's addressing enormous spiritual matters, specifically the nature of God. In "Love and Hard Times", He and Jesus show up for a surprise inspection of Earth, and it's a bit too precious until Simon interrupts and turns it into a sweet love song about love songs. God Himself narrates "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light", bemoaning that humanity doesn't get his jokes, and Simon sounds more at home in His head than in those of the various New Yorkers who narrate "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" and "Rewrite".

So Beautiful or So What can be stodgy in its emotions and a bit too devoted to its motifs, but there's something humanizing about the album's shortcomings. It is, thank God, no attempt to get his affairs in order, an approach that turns so many older artists' albums into solemn, end-of-life affairs. Simon's not worrying over redemption on these spiritual inquests; he's much more concerned about what he'll do in heaven once he gets there. Turns out, he'll be listening to his favorite American tunes. In "The Afterlife", "Be-Bop-a-Lula" and "Ooo Poo Pah Doo" form a celestial language, which may be the album's most satisfying revelation.

Those reference points-- Gene Vincent and Jessie Hill, not to mention Ramone, Graceland, and King's assassination on the title track-- all well predate Y2K, which is not unexpected for an artist who spent half of the previous century making music. Simon's too preoccupied with the 20th century to settle into the 21st, but here's the thing: It suits him. After foundering when he tried to sound new and modern, Simon comes across as much more at ease and compelling in this familiar setting. He's like a novelist revisiting the particulars of his youth; like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he wants to take in his times, and like John Updike, Simon cherishes small epiphanies, which resound like bombs in the marketplace. So perhaps the epiphany of So Beautiful or So What is that Paul Simon turns out to be a character in a Paul Simon song: An aging songwriter still struggling to connect, still figuring it all out, and still cranking the Dixie Hummingbirds.

Rating: 6.7

Stephen M. Deusner - April 15, 2011
© 2015 Pitchfork Media Inc.



2011 album from the Grammy-winning, multi-million selling veteran singer/songwriter. Produced by Phil Ramone and Paul Simon, with liner notes written by Elvis Costello, So Beautiful or So What is one of the most highly anticipated albums of the year. Rolling Stone magazine recently declared it, "His best since Graceland," and National Public Radio affirmed, "...his new music balances great poetry and pop. Paul Simon is a national treasure." In their current issue, Filter Magazine calls the new album, "...a new masterpiece from the Picasso of music."

Amazon.com



On "The Afterlife," an African-pop-flavored standout from his 12th solo album, Paul Simon describes the wait at the Pearly Gates like it's a trip to traffic court, all long lines, mumbled excuses and jokey asides. (The narrator even tries to pick up a woman while killing time.) But underneath the mischief are serious concerns. "It seems like our fate/To suffer and wait for the knowledge we seek," Simon sings amid a sharply syncopated groove and heavenly electric riffs. "The Afterlife" resolves darkness and light with a tossed-off charm — a specialty of New York poets from Frank O'Hara to Biggie Smalls, including Paul Simon. Simon's first album in five years is full of heavy business: life's meaning, beauty, brutality and brevity. Simon is pushing 70; it's appropriate that he's got mortality on his mind. But the songs rarely feel heavy. Instead, they combine the freewheeling folk of 1972's Paul Simon with the brilliant studio sculpting of Graceland. It's his best album since 1990's The Rhythm of the Saints, and it also sums up much of what makes Simon great.

The world-music fusions on So Beautiful or So What sound as matter-of-fact as ever, common tongues of a polyglot modern world. On "Rewrite," about a Vietnam vet working at a car wash while revising either a screenplay or his own haunted memory, Simon trades virtuoso lines on acoustic guitar with the kora harp of Yacouba Sissoko (who politely declines to outshine him; 21 strings versus six strings is an unfair contest) in what could be an afternoon jam session in Washington Square Park. "Dazzling Blue" feels just as organic, combining country-folk melodies with South Indian percussion in a love song about driving out to the beach on Long Island.

So Beautiful or So What is old-fashioned in its brevity (10 songs, 38 minutes) and vivid in its storytelling. On "Love Is Eternal Sacred Light," a roadhouse-blues jam that rides a ghostly techno pulse, a character who appears to be the Almighty (in one of a few album appearances) bitches while driving "a pre-owned '96 Ford" down the highway: "Check out the radio/Pop-music station/That don't sound like my music to me." Yeah, yeah: Everyone's a critic.

But Simon's reveries come through a lens of the present. "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" dialogues with history by sampling a 1941 sermon about mortality by preacher Rev. J.M. Gates, whose words pop up between Simon's rhymes about a kid in Iraq returned for a third tour of duty. As collage pop goes, it ain't Girl Talk. But it's unsettling in a modern, Internet-time-warp way, like PJ Harvey's "Written on the Forehead" — another recent song about war and human folly repeating itself, over and over again, in an endless loop.

Ultimately, So Beautiful or So What is a spiritual meditation that can't answer the big questions: Does God exist in a world of pain and inequality? Is there an afterlife? All Simon seems to know for sure is that there is love, and there is beauty — and that, afterlife or no, great songs live forever.

Will Hermes - April 5, 2011
RollingStone.com



So Beautiful or So What is the twelfth studio album by American singer-songwriter Paul Simon. Produced by Simon and Phil Ramone, the album released on April 8, 2011 by Hear Music. Following his collaboration with producer Brian Eno for Surprise (2006), Paul Simon began writing new music and introduced several songs gradually as the decade closed. Having experimented with rhythm-based textures for much of the previous two decades, Simon returned to composing songs rather traditionally using only his acoustic guitar. These songs were further augmented by experimental recording practices in the studio. The album marks his fifth and final album produced by Phil Ramone.

The album was largely recorded in a small cottage at Simon's property in New Canaan, Connecticut. The record contains West African blues-inspired guitar playing, Indian-style percussion, and experimentation with samples. These samples range wildly, from a 1941 sermon to nighttime ambience in Kenya. Musically, the album contains a lack of bass in most songs and a very large presence of bells. Much of Simon's lyricism on the album revolves around spirituality and mortality, a fact noted by music writers. Simon stated that this was unintentional, and came about naturally in his songwriting process.

Upon its release, So Beautiful or So What received universal acclaim from music critics, who praised Simon's themes and songwriting. Many considered it his best work in two decades, and it was included on many end-of-the-year lists as one of the best albums of the year. It became his highest US chart debut and charted within the top 10 in nine other countries.

So Beautiful or So What received universal acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 85, based on 27 reviews. Allmusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised Simon's musical "focus" and called it "an album that’s vivid, vibrant, and current in a way none of his peers have managed to achieve". Los Angeles Times writer Margaret Wappler complimented its "multiethnic landscape" and commented that the album, "steeped in Afropop and American folk forms, climbs some of the most resplendent summits of Simon’s career and ranks as his most consistent solo effort since  '​Rhythm of the Saints'​ from 1990". Philip Cummins of State magazine found Simon's observations vividly detailed and enduring, and hailed So Beautiful or So What as "his most vital, most complete album in 25 years." Jon Pareles, writing in The New York Times, said that "sketches of individuals and moments are intertwined with grander pronouncements; unforced humor tempers gloomier reflections". Will Hodgkinson of The Times said that Simon's meditations on the afterlife are informed by both youthful enthusiasm and the wisdom of old age.

Many critics compared it to his 1986 album Graceland. In his review for MSN Music, Robert Christgau found Simon's usual folk rock "graced with global colors that sound as natural" as his guitar and said that his writing is imbued with gratitude for his wife's love and God, although he disagreed with Simon's view of God's benevolent nature. In a mixed review, Andy Gill of The Independent said that the music is Simon's usual cross-genre style, but found his ruminations on love, age, and mortality to be trivial. Pitchfork Media's Stephen M. Deusner felt that the album "can be stodgy in its emotions and a bit too devoted to its motifs".

Many critics noticed the rather overt religious symbolism in the album's lyricism; one blogger facetiously called it the year's best Christian music album.

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