Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 133ff. His 1972 eponymous album, and 1973's There Goes Rhymin' Simon showed he was just as strong solo as he was with Art Garfunkel; Still Crazy After All These Years boasts some of his best songwriting. 19 This distinction follows that of Gerard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, transl. I think Still Crazy After All These Years was the last classic Simon album before there was a little dip with 1980's One-Tricky Pony. While an emergent pattern is of course open to individual interpretation, the perception of even a typical formal scheme like an arch form depends upon our ability to process such patterns.
Each additional print is $4. For Simon, they were when Alan Freed ruled the New York radio roost, and he was learning his trade, a small, skinny kid making the rounds of record companies in Manhattan, doing demonstration records of songs by others. At first it may seem as if Paul Simon's 1975 album, "Still Crazy After All These Years, " is itself a crazy choice of work for which to assert long-range structural patterns. 18 The lyrics read "I met my old lover / On the street last night / She seemed so glad to see me / I just smiled / And we talked about some old times / And we drank ourselves some beers / Still crazy after all these years. " "Paul Simon Live: Born at the Right Time Tour" airs Thursday from 7 to 10 p. m. on HBO. But, with the final turn of the chorus to C minor, the album ends on a note of resignation to a lonely and depressive fate. 18 These remembered good times are belied, however, by the motion to C minor interrupting the proper cadence on tonic. Schumann's Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und Leben immediately spring to mind, as the metaphorical and actual deaths depicted in the respective texts are mediated by the poet speaking via the postlude in the major mode. D#dim A. Oh, still crazy.
The Call of the Wild. And of course this increased harmonic sophistication is a hallmark of Simon's style, for which he is deservedly famous. God Bless The Absentee. Over the last ten years, popular music criticism has become an academically viable and even trendy affair embodying a broad range of subjects and methodologies. All, all was well again, All, all—love and pain, And world and dream! 38 Donald Mitchell, in his analysis of "Die zwei blauen Augen, " does not mention this aspect of the tonal strategy and its relation to the text. THE true masters of music. But the overall feel of Still Crazy was of a jazzy style subtly augmented with strings and horns. However, actual resolution to G is averted until the last chord of the song. If pattern completion is a logical-syntactical principle for cycles, then association—here defined as the consistent grouping of musical (along with narrative) features—is more an expressive principle. Bad Bad Leroy Brown. Following the conclusion of the narrative proper in "You're Kind, " the final epilogue-like song, "Silent Eyes, " offers visions of sorrow, hopes of redemption, and the ominous prospect of Judgment Day (Example 6). The Popular Album as Song Cycle: Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years. 29 The bridge then modulates to D major, its climax corresponding with the rather unfortunate rhyme "She burns like a flame / And she calls my name. "
At their best, such sentiments were undercut by humor and made palatable by musical hooks, as on "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, " which became the biggest solo hit of Simon's career. 16 This sketch, as well as those in subsequent examples, adopts Schenkerian analytical conventions, in that rhythmic values denote relative structural importance rather than duration (thus, stemless noteheads are least important, half notes most important); notes beamed together denote a significant linear/harmonic pattern, and dotted lines indicate the prolongation of a single pitch. Start the discussion! Unlike individual songs, however, cycles are a more elusive thing to draw as likenesses, since here we are speaking more of general patterns and strategies than of specific progressions. Then "Silent Eyes" proceeds to reverse the progression, this time stating each of the tonicized areas first in major, then in the parallel minor. Four in the morning. Not that this affects the material. The song provides large-scale closure by means of pattern completion; that this appears to be Simon's intention will be corroborated by comparing the first and second versions of the song at the conclusion of the analysis. By: Instruments: |Voice, range: A3-A5 Piano|. The resultant disjunction between narrative statement and embodied meaning of the musical progression is not only a conventional means of conveying irony in text settings in general; here the specific intrusion of C minor foreshadows the end of the album, which, as we shall see, similarly depends on the modal shift from major to minor and an embodied musical meaning deliberately at odds with the text. 19 There are three non-narrative songs which may be categorized as fable ("Night Game"), meditation on the protagonist's psychological state ("Some Folks' Lives"), and epilogue ("Silent Eyes").
3 Of course analogous issues sometimes apply to earlier works, such as Schubert's Schwanengesang, which was ordered as a set by his publisher. Example 7 summarizes the key succession of Side 2 and the tonal progression of "Silent Eyes. That whisper in my ears. No information about this song. With a few exceptions (including Robert Gauldin's exemplary analysis of Side Two of the Beatles' "Abbey Road"), current writing on popular music has mainly focused on either general style, socio-cultural issues, or the analysis of individual songs. "Kodachrome" bounds out of the gate with deep bass, chattering percussion, detailed and springy-sounding and resonant acoustic guitars and joyous good vibrations. By a jury of my peers. "I just saw him yesterday with his baby. Interestingly, the start of the new affair opening Part II is made explicit, in that the implied dialogue between protagonist and confidante / lover in "50 Ways" becomes an actual duet in "Gone At Last, " sung by Simon and Phoebe Snow. ) Some still remember the good old days, though.