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Paul Simon: Stranger to Stranger

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Concord Records
Released: 2016.06.03
Time:
 69:35
Category: Folk Rock, Pop
Producer(s): Paul Simon, Roy Halee
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: paulsimon.com
Appears with: Simon & Garfunkel
Purchase date: 2016
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] The Werewolf (P.Simon) - 3:25
[2] Wristband (P.Simon) - 3:17
[3] The Clock (P.Simon) - 1:02
[4] Street Angel (P.Simon) - 2:11
[5] Stranger to Stranger (P.Simon) - 4:35
[6] In a Parade (P.Simon) - 2:21
[7] Proof of Love (P.Simon) - 5:44
[8] In the Garden of Edie (P.Simon) - 1:48
[9] The Riverbank (P.Simon) - 4:11
[10] Cool Papa Bell (P.Simon) - 4:02
[11] Insomniac’s Lullaby (P.Simon) - 4:33

Deluxe Edition:
[12] Horace and Pete (P.Simon) - 2:30
[13] Duncan [Live from A Prairie Home Companion February 2016] (P.Simon) - 4:43
[14] Wristband [Live from A Prairie Home Companion] (P.Simon) - 3:28
[15] Guitar Piece 3 (P.Simon) - 1:10
[16] New York Is My Home [with Dion] (P.Simon/D.DiMucci) - 4:30

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Paul Simon - Vocals, Acoustic & Electric Guitar, Autoharp, Baritone Acoustic Guitar, Bass Harmonica, Celeste, Chromelodeon, Clock, Glockenspiel, Gopichand, Harmonium, Mbira, Percussion, 12-String Guitar, Producer

Bobby Allende - Conga Drums
David Broome - Chromelodeon
C.J. Camerieri - French Horn, Horns, Trumpet
Clap! Clap! - Electronic Drums, Programming, Samples, Synthesizers
Jack Dejohnette - Drums
Dean Drummond - Bamboo Marimba, Zoomoozophone
Dave Eggar - Cello
Alan Ferber - Trombone
Gil Goldstein - String Arrangements
Golden Gate Quartet - Sampled Backing Vocals
Nelson González - Maracas, Tres
Wycliffe Gordon - Trombone
Jamey Haddad - Brushes, Hadjira, Percussion
Paul Halley - Pipe Organ
Carlos Henriquez - Acoustic Bass, Bass
Katie Kresek - Viola
Bakithi Kumalo - Bass Guitar, Electric Bass
Steve Marion - Slide Guitar
Sergio Martínez - Hand Claps, Percussion
Bobby Mcferrin - Backing Vocals
Keith Montie - Backing Vocals
Nico Muhly - Celeste, Orchestra Bells, Horn And Flute Arrangements
Vincent Nguini - Electric And Acoustic Guitar
Jim Oblon - Drum Machine, Drums, Electronic Drums, Percussion
Nino De Los Reyes - Hand Claps, Percussion
Oscar De Los Reyes - Hand Claps, Percussion
Marcus Rojas - Tuba
Mick Rossi - Glockenspiel, Harmonium, Rhodes
Andy Snitzer - Saxophone, Backing Vocals
Jared Soldiviero - Bamboo Marimba, Bowed Marimba, Cloud Chamber Bowls, Harmonic Canon
Alex Sopp - Flute
Mark Stewart - Big Boing Mbira, Trombadoo

Roy Halee - Mixing, Producer
Andy Smith - Engineer
Greg Calbi - Mastering
Geoff Gans - Art Direction, Design
Mark Chiarello - Artwork
Don Hunstein - Photography
Kerry Ryan McFate - Photography
Steven N. Severinghaus - Photography
Chuck Close - Cover Image

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


"The Werewolf" opens Stranger to Stranger, Paul Simon's thirteenth solo studio album, with a heavy rhythmic thud -- bass, drums, and maracas lumbering along in a modified Bo Diddley beat not a far cry from the Who's "Slip Kid." Simon isn't looking to the past, though: he's writing toward an inevitable sunset, mindful of mortality -- just like he was on 2011's So Beautiful or So What -- but he's firmly grounded in a tumultuous present, embracing all the cut-and-paste contradictions endemic to the digital age. With the exception of a pair of hushed acoustic numbers and the expansive title track, all positioned to provide necessary pressure relief from the density of the rest of the record, Stranger to Stranger feels built from the rhythm up, a tactic familiar to Simon since 1986's Graceland. Unlike the easy gait of Graceland, the words here are clipped and rushed, sliding in with the bustle of the rhythm. It's not that the songs aren't melodic -- hooks arrive in snatches, sometimes forming through the rhythms themselves -- but the tracks are cloistered and colorful, accentuated by traces of gospel and doo wop; there's even an apparent "Love Is Strange" sample. Echoes of tradition existing within this modern framework are telling, underscoring how Simon is making music where the past is ever-present but not consuming: he's shifted his aesthetic to mirror his times, a tactic common in his solo career. In many ways, Stranger to Stranger is as bracing and ambitious as Surprise, his 2006 collaboration with producer Brian Eno -- this is especially true of its opening triptych, all created with Italian dance musician Clap! Clap! -- but the tenor of this album is different. Where the specter of 9/11 hung heavily over Surprise, Simon seems at peace on Stranger to Stranger, acknowledging the twilight yet not running toward it because there's so much to experience in the moment. He's choosing to push forward, not look back, and the results are invigorating.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



Some recurring images on Paul Simon's new LP: hospitals; insomnia; heaven and the after- life; riots and looting; a character called the Street Angel; wolves; love; God. Just some stuff in the head of a 74-year-old New Yorker, spun casually into art in that sagely, choirboy-cum-everymensch voice. Even Simon's discourse on the word "motherfucker" – on the irresistible "Cool Papa Bell" – feels nearly Talmudic. "I think, yeah/ The word is ugly, all the same/ Ugly got a case to make," he sings, pretty as a motherfucker.

That's not even the funniest bit on Stranger to Stranger, a record that draws together nearly all of the man's accrued vernacular with seeming effortlessness: the gentle folk of Simon and Garfunkel; the gospel flavor of There Goes Rhymin' Simon; the percolating Afropop of Graceland; the samba fireworks from The Rhythm of the Saints; the vintage-sample flip ping of 2011's So Beautiful or So What. His latest continues in the same vein; it's as inviting, immaculately produced, jokey and unsettled a record as any he has ever made. His sophisticated feel for rhythm – always his secret weapon, even as a folkie – is in full force here, with beats by Italian Afrophile electronic musician Cristiano Crisci (a.k.a. Clap! Clap!) and his own varied, subtle vocal phrasing.

Stranger to Stranger's comic high point comes straight out of the gate on "The Werewolf," a tall tale about a middling Midwesterner whose wife kills him with a sushi knife, then shops for heavenly, or perhaps purgatorial, real estate. "Most obits are mixed reviews," Simon notes. "Wristband" is similar, whimsical storytelling jumpcutting into something darker. It begins with an amusing enactment of a musician locked out of his own show. Suddenly, the title becomes a metaphor for class war: "The riots started slowly," Simon sings soberly, "with the homeless and the lowly." There's no cheap resolution between the two elements; they just sit there, cognitive dissonance over boogaloo brass and a funky acoustic bass line.

As on most of his recordings, Simon explores new musical territory alongside the familiar. Besides Clap! Clap!'s earthy grooves, he draws on the sounds of iconoclastic avant-garde composer Harry Partch. On the final track, "Insomniac's Lullaby," cloud-chamber bowls, chromelodeon, zoomoozophone and bowed marimba pullulate like cosmic carpenter ants beneath Simon's acoustic guitar and voice, as he sings of lying alone in bed with his fears. "We'll eventually all fall asleep," Simon concludes – true, of course, in both the immediate and existential sense. It's a grace-note glimpse of the infinite, from a man who seems in no rush to get there.

Will Hermes - June 7, 2016
RollingStone



Stranger to Stranger is arguably the best album of Paul Simon's uneven post-Graceland solo career. His reliably melodic songwriting is buoyed by his most adventurous arrangements in years.

Of all the baby-boomer heroes to make it past 70, none have been old longer than Paul Simon. Raised in Queens to first-generation Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, he copyrighted his first song, “The Girl for Me,” with Art Garfunkel when he was 14, an indication both of his preternatural ambition and a belief that art is as much a business as it is a means of self-expression. He never rebelled, never played to fashion, never seemed as interested in the dangerous divinations of rock‘n’roll as in the quiet diligence of songwriters from the 1930s and ’40s, who kept short hair and bankers’ hours. He has claimed that he tried to be ironic a few times, but it didn’t work. His first crime is mildness; his second is thinking. He might be your parents’ favorite musician, but your grandparents probably thought he was a pretty decent guy too.

The same qualities that made Simon seem square as a younger artist made him durable into—and beyond—middle age. His second solo album, Paul Simon, invented the literate, introverted style we now call indie-folk, and beat Oscar the Grouch by two years in suggesting that melancholy isn’t a weakness, but a form of insulation against even worse emotional weather. In the ’80s, when Bob Dylan was making kabuki disco albums and Simon’s other ’60s peers—the Rolling Stones, for example—were getting lost in the open ocean of too much encouragement, Simon recorded Graceland, an album whose South African sound was both middlebrow and radical, universally likable and yet alien to Simon's typical audience. (For further listening on this subject, visit the compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, released just around the time Graceland came out. It endures.)

Simon’s lyrics, which had always been less about people being free than people getting by, were maturing: He was more aloof now, but funnier, too. Take this, the first verse of a song called “Gumboots”:

"I was having this discussion in a taxi heading downtown/Rearranging my position on this friend of mine who had a little bit of a breakdown/I said, ‘Hey, you know, breakdowns come and breakdowns go/ So what are you going to do about it? That’s what I’d like to know.’”

Twenty years earlier, he would’ve zeroed in on the breakdown and thrown an orchestra at it; now it was relegated to a couple lines on an album with a host of other problems to compartmentalize. Here was someone stepping into the tempered disappointments of being 40 like they were shoes bought just a little too soon. This, he recently told a class at Yale, is when Simon says he was finally comfortable admitting he was an artist.

Simon’s post-Graceland career has had its embarrassments, but as with a lot of older, canonized artists, critics seem to take an unusual kind of glee in magnifying them, when, near as I can tell, he bothers the public far less than the rest of his graduating class. There was The Capeman, a musical about the Puerto Rican gang member Salvador Agron, which is one of those sub-middling projects nobody would’ve heard about if it wasn’t coming to us from Paul Simon, but since it was coming to us from Paul Simon, people heard about it a lot more than they needed to. (Several writers—myself included, I admit—have noted how unconvincing Simon is when using the word “fuck,” which he attempts several times on the soundtrack.) There was 2006’s Surprise, which found him working with Brian Eno, an artist of related but incompatible genius whose deference to atmosphere tended to wash out the quiet precision of Simon’s songs.

So Beautiful or So What from 2011 was a lot better, and, for an artist of Simon’s stature, surprisingly weird—the sound of an elder statesman settling into his own idiosyncrasies, seemingly unconcerned with legacy or relevance. More than anything, Simon in the ’00s reminds me of the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, himself a national treasure whose albums have only gotten leaner and more enigmatic as he keeps making them.

Which brings us to Stranger to Stranger, a compact, often jittery album populated by schizophrenics, disenfranchised teenagers, musicians locked out of their own gigs, and some kind of avenging werewolf coming to kill the rich. I’ve always attributed part of Simon’s enormous popularity to how good he is at teasing out life’s silver linings, at softening disappointment with bittersweetness, regret with nostalgia. Even his saddest songs contain the implicit bromide that life goes on.

Here, things feel less reassuring, more open-ended. Several of the album’s songs—“Street Angel,” “In a Parade,” “The Werewolf”—are bemused and overstuffed, rickshaw rides down busy, unfamiliar streets with people you can’t quite get a read on. Even the album’s friendliest moment, a light, West African-style folksong called “Cool Papa Bell,” is shadowed by lines about “the thrill you feel when evil dreams come true.” (It also contains Simon’s most convincing use of the word “fuck” yet.) Here, Simon’s voice—always boyish, always a little bit distracted—takes on the ominous warmth of Albert Brooks in Drive, who isn’t slitting your wrist until he is.

The shift here is from wisdom to prophecy, from certainty to contingency. Musically, it’s his most adventurous album since Graceland, filed with strange rhythmic kinks and a junkyard’s worth of barely identifiable sounds. Simon’s appropriation of new styles has often had the unfortunate effect of making it seem like he’s domesticating them, making them palatable for the king’s court. (This was, of course, a big debate around Graceland.) Here, he gets as close as he’s ever been to the romantic ideal of kids gathered on a corner banging on what they found in the alley, or of the weird old guy bumping down the road in a wooden cart filled with treasures unknown, from the chimes of “The Clock” and the accidental ambience of “In the Garden of Edie” to the vocal sample on “Street Angel,” flipped and processed to make it sound like a clogged drain. (The sample comes from the Golden Gate Quartet, a proto-gospel group who Simon also sampled on So Beautiful or So What, and who invented what in my estimation is the safest anti-depressant on the market.)

Simon has claimed inspiration in part from the American composer Harry Partch, who envisioned a scale that broke up the customary 12 tones into 43, creating slippages and interstices and little gradations of sound that might seem like dissonance to Western ears but that have an oblique, mysterious beauty. Simon borrows a couple of Partch’s homemade instruments here—the zoomoozophone, the chromelodeon—but also borrows a little of his spirit, of a transient life, of quick fixes and no clear plan. My favorite lyrics sound thrillingly unwritten, raw footage of wit in action. Consider it a corrective to a career of smoothing things over: Stranger to Stranger is unpasteurized, mongrel music.

Simon has always been subject to criticism for a certain kind of exceptionalism. Two of his biggest songs, “I Am a Rock” and “Sounds of Silence,” deal with characters who wear their alienation like badges, dark lords of their own personal libraries left with no choice but to turn their faces heroically away from the sheeple who surround them. This was a guy who responded to the news of his partner going to work on a movie in Mexico by writing a song called “The Only Living Boy in New York,” never mind the other 6 million people living there.

As his career wore on, the alienation mellowed into casual arrogance. By 1983’s Hearts and Bones, which Simon himself has acknowledged as an artistic dead-end, he had become the kind of guy who shows up at the party but never has a good time, bored by life but willing to smirk at it, who thinks he’s better than you but is too polite to say so.

We see some of that guy on Stranger, just as we see him on every Paul Simon album—that’s part of what makes it a Paul Simon album. The musician on “Wristband,” for example, who draws an analogy between his own frustrations getting back into the VIP area and what poor people must feel on the brink of a riot. Personally, I see it as satire, the portrait of someone who has mostly lost touch with reality but still has to answer to it eventually. My guess is many will see it as condescension.

Then again, pop has always been nicer to artists who portray struggle than relative ease, more welcoming of emotional engagement than emotional detachment, and increasingly hostile both to intelligence and ambiguity. Simon is all these supposedly bad things and worse. For every one of him, there are 10 guys waiting to stuff him into a locker—that’s how it is, and probably how it’ll always be. “It turns out to be a great thing for me, I don’t worry/I don’t think,” he sings at the beginning of “Cool Papa Bell.” “Because it’s not my job to worry or to think. Not me. I’m more like—every day I’m here I’m grateful.” Anyone familiar with Simon's music knows he must be talking about someone else; his genius is being able to sell the line anyway.

Mike Powell - June 9 2016
pitchfork.com



Stranger to Stranger is the thirteenth solo studio album by American folk rock singer-songwriter Paul Simon. Produced by Paul Simon and Roy Halee, it was released on June 3, 2016 through Concord Records. Simon wrote the material over a period of several years, perfecting it and rewriting it to his liking. Its music is experimental, making use of custom-made instruments by composer and music theorist Harry Partch. Three of the songs on the album are collaborations with Italian electronic artist Clap! Clap!.

His first release in over five years, Stranger to Stranger received wide critical acclaim. It represented Simon's highest-ever debut on the Billboard 200, at number three, and reached number one on the UK Albums Chart.

Simon began writing new material shortly after releasing his twelfth studio album, So Beautiful or So What, in April 2011. Simon collaborates with the Italian electronic dance music artist Clap! Clap! on three songs—"The Werewolf", "Street Angel", and "Wristband". Simon was introduced to him by his son, Adrian, who was a fan of his work. The two met up in July 2011 when Simon was touring behind So Beautiful or So What in Milan, Italy. He and Clap! Clap! worked together via email over the course of making the album. Simon also worked with longtime friend Roy Halee, who is listed as co-producer on the album. Halee, who had since retired, was mostly recruited to advise on how to create natural echo. He was unfamiliar with Pro Tools, so Simon helped him with it. "I always liked working with him more than anyone else," Simon noted.

Andy Greene of Rolling Stone dubbed Stranger to Stranger an "experimental album heavy on echo and rhythm that fuses electronic beats with African woodwind instruments, Peruvian drums, a gospel music quartet, horns and synthesizers." The album makes usage of custom-made instruments, such as the Cloud-Chamber Bowls and the Chromelodeon, which were created by music theorist Harry Partch in the mid-twentieth century. Simon briefly moved the sessions to Montclair State University, where the instruments are stored, in 2013 in order to employ them on the album. "Parch said there were 43 tones to an octave and not 12," Simon remarked in Rolling Stone. "He had a totally different approach to what music is and had to build his own instruments so he could compose on a microtonal scale. That microtonal thinking pervades this album."

"The Werewolf" centers around a werewolf, also an angel of death, who is looking for victims. The song's origins came from Simon and his band experimenting with slowing down the tempo of a recording they made of the Peruvian percussion instrument Cajón, the Indian instrument gopichand, and hand claps. "Wristband" creates a narrative around a rock musician unable to gain entry into his own concert because he lacks the wristband required. "The Riverbank" was inspired by a teacher that Simon personally knew who was slain in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012. It also takes root in a visit Simon made to wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital. "Proof of Love" and "In the Garden of Edie", meanwhile, stand as tributes to Simon's wife, musician Edie Brickell. The album also has continuity, with characters reappearing in songs. "The idea of finishing one song and having the character appear in another song appeals to me. I don't see why characters shouldn't appear more than oncStranger to Stranger received critical acclaim. 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 25 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim." The Guardian's Jon Dennis deemed it "as rewarding as anything he's done," praising his "tenacious pursuit of new sounds." Jonathan Bernstein of Entertainment Weekly dubbed it "one of his very boldest collections to date [... it] is brimming with concepts and sounds that push Simon’s musical boundaries further than ever." Randy Lewis at the Los Angeles Times wrote that "This is pop music at its most artful and relevant, a sentiment from a septuagenarian representative of rock’s old guard that's arguably as potent as anything from seemingly more streetwise artists one-third his age." Will Hermes of Rolling Stone wrote that "it's as inviting, immaculately produced, jokey and unsettled a record as any he has ever made.

Ben Rosner, writing for Paste, called it "a testament to an artist who refuses to be ordinary and pigeonholed. With this LP, Paul Simon has created his best work in many years." The Independent's Andy Gill also considered it his "best in several years," writing, "Few songwriters can juggle seriousness and whimsy as adeptly as Paul Simon." Steve Smith of The Boston Globe considered it Simon's "richest, most instantly appealing collection since Graceland (1986)." Jim Beviglia of American Songwriter wrote that "this disc features Simon at his most restless, in terms of both his questioning lyrics and his search for the right sound, and that restlessness pays off for the listener in endlessly fascinating ways." Ryan Bray of Consequence of Sound gave it a B, commenting, "Simon again proves himself to be among the most sonically adventurous elder statesmen in pop music." Elysa Gardner of USA Today gave the record four out of four stars, opining, "The worst monsters on Stranger may ultimately be those we recognize from the news, or the mirror; but our better angels are here as well, feeling groovy and sounding like heaven."e," said Simon. The instrumentals "The Clock" and "In the Garden of Edie" function as interludes, designed to give listeners "space." The two tracks were originally composed for John Patrick Shanley's play Prodigal Son, but went unused.

Stranger to Stranger was first announced when Simon announced his tour dates in February 2016. It was officially announced with the lead single "Wristband" premiering online on April 7, 2016. The cover art for the album taken from a portrait of Simon painted by artist Chuck Close.

Simon has planned an American tour due to start with an appearance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on April 29, 2016.

Stranger to Stranger received critical acclaim. 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 25 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim." The Guardian's Jon Dennis deemed it "as rewarding as anything he's done," praising his "tenacious pursuit of new sounds." Jonathan Bernstein of Entertainment Weekly dubbed it "one of his very boldest collections to date [... it] is brimming with concepts and sounds that push Simon’s musical boundaries further than ever." Randy Lewis at the Los Angeles Times wrote that "This is pop music at its most artful and relevant, a sentiment from a septuagenarian representative of rock’s old guard that's arguably as potent as anything from seemingly more streetwise artists one-third his age." Will Hermes of Rolling Stone wrote that "it's as inviting, immaculately produced, jokey and unsettled a record as any he has ever made."

Ben Rosner, writing for Paste, called it "a testament to an artist who refuses to be ordinary and pigeonholed. With this LP, Paul Simon has created his best work in many years." The Independent's Andy Gill also considered it his "best in several years," writing, "Few songwriters can juggle seriousness and whimsy as adeptly as Paul Simon." Steve Smith of The Boston Globe considered it Simon's "richest, most instantly appealing collection since Graceland (1986)." Jim Beviglia of American Songwriter wrote that "this disc features Simon at his most restless, in terms of both his questioning lyrics and his search for the right sound, and that restlessness pays off for the listener in endlessly fascinating ways." Ryan Bray of Consequence of Sound gave it a B, commenting, "Simon again proves himself to be among the most sonically adventurous elder statesmen in pop music. Elysa Gardner of USA Today gave the record four out of four stars, opining, "The worst monsters on Stranger may ultimately be those we recognize from the news, or the mirror; but our better angels are here as well, feeling groovy and sounding like heaven."

The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, selling 19,218 copies in its first week. At the age of 74 years and eight months, Paul Simon is the oldest male solo artist to chart at number one in the UK. It is his first number-one studio album since The Rhythm of the Saints (1990).

In the United States, Stranger to Stranger debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 68,000 units. The album was the overall best-selling album for the week based on pure album sales (67,000 copies). It is Simon's highest charting album in over 29 years, since Still Crazy After All These Years (1975).

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