The title of this ultimate love song reflects a realm of human love which isn’t expressed often in song: the inability to accept the good things in life. VIDEO: Paul Simon, “Something So Right,” 1973,
There is acoustic bass and electric bass on it, plus vibes and three guitars. I was working with Phil Ramone, and he was introducing me to musicians that he had worked with, such as Quincy as well as the other guys on that – Bobby Scott on piano and Grady Tate on drums. I don’t know when I came to the conclusion that it should be a love song.īut I felt that this was not about a third-person experience It was going to be a personal song.
The original lyric was not a love song, it was kind of a gospel lyric. I had a complete set of other lyrics: different title, different subject matter. PAUL SIMON: I thought that was a nice straight-ahead love song. The demo of this first version of the song is below, with the original lyrics.
It’s from a series of interviews I conducted in 1992 at his Manhattan apartment, soon after he married Edie Brickell. Here’s that additional material directly from the source, Paul Simon. Simon confirms, in this newly-recovered interview section we are sharing below, that a revision was necessary to unify the love theme of the song. This covered his albums from `There Goes Rhymin’ Simon,’ his second solo album (featuring “Something So Right”) and concluded with `Hearts and Bones,’ his final album before `Graceland.’Īs mentioned in the first publication of this story, the lyrics of “Something So Right” are so focussed and poignantly human, built around the title, that it’s surprising to discover that Simon wrote it with another chorus and title altogether, before reinventing it as the song we know now. I wrote the middle chapter, The Solo Years. Kevin Howlett of the BBC did the first chapter, and Paul’s friend, the composer Philip Glass, wrote the third chapter.
That Box Set divided his career into three sections: The Early Years, The Solo Years, and `Graceland’ and Beyond.
Until today, that is, when I realized it was not included in any of the published interviews we did, but from interviews I conducted and then adapted for the liner notes of Paul Simon 1964/1993, his first box set. Though I knew that Simon, in one of our many interviews, spoke about the birth of this song, I couldn’t find it anywhere. This is a revision to our original story behind “Something So Right” by Paul Simon. Since publication, we discovered we had the story of this song directly from Simon himself, which we bring you now Read this new addendum to the story behind the song, and hear the original demo of the song in its first incarnation,