REVIEW
From Acoustic Guitar, March 2001

THAT'S WHERE I BELONG

In the work of the best songwriters—the ones who keep breaking ground from year to year and album to album—each new project bears the mark of everything that preceded it, and in turn makes possible the music that follows. So it is with Paul Simon’s album You’re the One, which could only have been produced at this moment, the opening of his fifth decade as one of the standard bearers of songwriting.

At its core, You’re the One is a fusion of two distinct eras in Simon’s music: the intimate conversational poetry and sophisticated harmonies of ’70s solo albums like Still Crazy After All These Years and the percolating beats of his world-music triumphs The Rhythm of the Saints and Graceland. You’re the One also marks a return of sorts of Simon the guitarist, who has been in the background for the last dozen years or so, although his songs remain engrossed in the intricacies of African and Latin-American drumming. Add in several dollops of North Indian raga (mostly supplied by bansuri flutist Steve Gorn), and you wind up with a stylistic mix that is, in a way, deeply strange. But Simon blends and juxtaposes his sources so masterfully and unself-consciously that all we can do is submit.

There are many high points along this journey: "Love," with an achingly beautiful minor-to-major chord progression led by Simon on sitar-guitar (a homegrown creation of North Carolina luthier Glenn Wyllie); the lilting "Señorita with a Necklace of Tears," featuring silvery twin acoustic guitar lines; and the title track, which manages to shoehorn a dreamy Indian interlude into a bubbling Afro-pop groove. On "Old," Simon revisits his rockabilly roots (strumming an electric guitar, as he does on much of the album) and offers a wry comeback to friends who say he’s getting on in years. He dips into the blues in the darkly comic "Pigs, Sheep, and Wolves," featuring slippery resonator slide by Mark Stewart, then pulls off a dazzling kitchen-sink arrangement on "Hurricane Eye," with folky banjo and dulcimer building into crunching power chords and a revved-up West African–style guitar finale.

None of this globe-trotting would be possible without an exceptional cast of backing musicians, and Simon surely has one. His interplay with guitarist Vincent Nguini has become near telepathic, and the grooves laid down by drummer Steve Gadd, percussionists Jamey Haddad and Steve Shehan, and bassist Bakithi Kumalo are simply as good as they get. Only a truly gifted group of players could pull off something like "Darling Lorraine," which over the course of six and a half minutes follows the arc of a relationship from meeting to marriage to separation to some sort of terminal illness, accompanied by a thicket of contrasting sections and metrical shifts.

One of the greatest challenges for any songwriter is to deliver emotional and musical complexity without sounding overwrought or self-consciously clever. The songs on Capeman, Simon’s musical theater opus of the ’90s, seemed a bit weighed down by their ambitions and the painstaking process of adapting to a new medium. By contrast, You’re the One feels light and airy, radiating the kind of joy in songwriting that made Graceland such a delight. For every dense composition like "Darling Lorraine" or "Teacher" there is the counterbalance of pure pop simplicity and the goofiness of ’50s rock, from "oom bop a doom" to "You’re the one / You broke my heart / You made me cry."

That lightness of spirit could only come from someone who is very much at home with this juncture in his music and life, a message that rings throughout this album right from the opening words:

For a songwriter, there can be no sweeter affirmation. You’re the One portends a lot more great music from someone who has already given us so much.

--Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers