Paul Simon – There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (2023 MFSL UltraDisc UHR SACD) (1973/2023)
SACD Rip | SACD ISO | DST64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 35:40 minutes | Full Scans included | 1,5 GB
Genre: Folk Rock, Pop Rock | Publisher (label): Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab – UDSACD 2217
Demonstrating a deep-seated flair for soul and R&B, Paul Simon recruited gospel backup singers and traveled to the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios to further refine the vibrant sounds he desired for There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. His instincts proved correct. Many rightly consider the iconic singer-songwriter’s third album a masterpiece – one that, per critic Robert Christgau, “suggests a new grace and flexibility for the mass-pop mode, and invests small subjects and emotions with an almost luminous wit and awareness.”
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Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All These Years (1975/2021)
SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | ~ 1.46 GB
or DSD64 2.0 (SACD-ISO => Tracks.dff) > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | ~ 1.07 GB
or 24-bit/88.2 kHz | Flac(Tracks) | ~ 415 Mb
Pop-Rock | Mobile Fidelity, UDSACD 2212 | Artwork: 124 Mb
Still Crazy After All These Years is the fourth solo studio album by Paul Simon. Recorded and released in 1975, the album produced four U.S. Top 40 hits and won two Grammy Awards for Album of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance in 1976. Mastered by Shawn R. Britton at Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, Sebastopol, CA on the GAIN HD system.
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Paul Simon – The Paul Simon Songbook (1965/2004)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 38:40 minutes | 258 MB | Genre: Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Columbia – Legacy
The Paul Simon Songbook is the first solo studio album by Paul Simon. It was recorded in London and released in the UK in 1965 and was supposedly deleted in 1969 at Simon’s request. The album was produced by Reginald Warburton and Stanley West as CBS Records LP 62579, and later remastered for Columbia/Legacy CD 90281.
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Paul Simon – Songs From The Capeman (1997/2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:20 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Soundtrack, Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Legacy Recordings
Somewhat of an oddity from Paul Simon’s catalog, Songs From The Capeman is an interesting selection of songs from the Broadway production of The Capeman, also by Simon. These selections are, however, performed by Simon along and not the original cast. This makes this album somewhat unusual and remarkable. There are traces of Doo-Wop and Latin music here making for a terrifically enjoyable experience.
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Title: Paul Simon – The Concert in Hyde Park
Release Date: 2017
Genre: Rock, Folk Rock, Soft Rock, Pop Rock
Director: Adam Dunaway
Artists: Paul Simon – Guitar, Vocals; Tony Cedras – Accordion, Keyboards, Percussion, Trumpet, Vocals (Background); Jamey Haddad – Percussion; Bakithi Kumalo – Bass, Percussion; Isaac Mtshali – Drums; Vincent Nguini – Guitar, Vocals (Background); Jim Oblon – Drums, Guitar, Vocals (Background); Ray Phiri – Guitar, Vocals (Background); Barney Rachabane – Penny Whistle, Sax (Alto); Mick Rossi – Keyboards, Organ, Percussion, Piano, Pump Organ; John Selolwane – Guitar, Vocals (Background); Andy Snitzer – Percussion, Sax (Tenor), Vibraphone, Vocals (Background); Mark Stewart – Guitar, Harmonic Bass, Sax (Baritone), Vocals (Background); Bongi Mabaso, Sweety Mhlanga, Sonti Mndebele – Vocals (Background); feat. Jimmy Cliff, Jerry Douglas, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Thandiswa Mazwai
Production/Label: Sony Music
Duration: 02:12:50
Quality: Blu-ray
Container: BDMV
Video codec: AVC
Audio codec: AC-3, PCM
Video: MPEG-4 AVC 27000 kbps / 1920*1080i / 29,970 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1
Audio #1: English LPCM 5.1 / 48 kHz / 6912 kbps / 24-bit
Audio #2: English Dolby Digital 5.1 / 48 kHz / 640 kbps
Audio #3: English LPCM 2.0 / 48 kHz / 2304 kbps / 24-bit
Size: 36.37 GB
Two CD + Blu-ray edition. The Concert in Hyde Park chronicles the legendary artist’s historic concert at the 2012 Hard Rock Calling Festival in London with an epic career-spanning set including Simon’s most enduring hits (“Kodachrome,” “Graceland,” “Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard,” “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”), fan favorites, and two Simon & Garfunkel classics. The concert features a reunion with the original Graceland musicians on the Grammy-winning album’s 25th anniversary, including Hugh Masekela and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, as well as a surprise appearance from reggae legend Jimmy Cliff, performing his original songs “The Harder They Come” and “Many Rivers to Cross”, and a duet with Cliff and Simon on “Vietnam” and “Mother and Child Reunion.”
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Title: Paul Simon and Friends: The Library of Congress – Gershwin Prize for Popular Song
Release Date: 2009
Genre: Folk Rock
Production/Label: Summit Entertainment
Duration: 01:45:39
Quality: Blu-ray
Container: BDMV
Video codec: AVC
Audio codec: AC-3, PCM
Video: 1920×1080, MPEG-4 AVC, 23.976 fps, ~20.5 Mbps
Audio: TrueHD 5.1, 48 kHz, 24 bits, ~ 3.5 Mbps
Size: 21.67 GB
In 21 May of 2007 the Library of Congress gathered an unprecedented group of musicians together in Washington, D.C., to honor Paul Simon as the first recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Alison Krauss, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Lyle Lovett, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Marc Anthony, Art Garfunkel and a host of others joined Paul onstage in a multicultural tribute to the music of a great American artist and a great American art form.
This gala event, called the greatest night of popular music ever presented in our nation s capital, was beautifully filmed in high definition and captured with stunning Dolby TrueHD for a trulysuperior concert experience.
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Title: Paul Simon – Live in New York City
Release Date: 2012
Genre: Rock
Production/Label: Concord Music Group
Duration: 01:34:59
Quality: Blu-ray
Container: BDMV
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Audio codec: PCM
Video: MPEG-4 AVC Video 17996 kbps 1080p / 23,976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1
Audio: LPCM Audio English 2304 kbps 2.0 / 48 kHz / 2304 kbps / 24-bit
Size: 14.55 GB
During the first leg of Paul Simon’s triumphant, 2011 U.S. tour, he thrilled hometown fans with a special club performance at New York City’s historic Webster Hall. The show, captured on film for PAUL SIMON LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY, is set for release on September 18th, 2012 and presents this iconic artist working at the peak of his artistic and creative powers in an unusually intimate setting.
PAUL SIMON LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY (Hear Music/Concord Music Group) recorded in superb high-definition by director Martyn Atkins along with sterling audio mixed by Phil Ramone and Andy Smith, will be available in three formats: 2-CD/1-DVD special package, Blu-ray and Standard DVD.
The 20-song, 90-minute set list was drawn from his legendary career and includes several songs that haven’t been performed live in many years. “Kodachrome,” “Mother and Child Reunion,” “Gone At Last” and “The Obvious Child” are just some of the highlights as well as songs from Simon’s most recent album, 2011’s So Beautiful or So What (Hear Music/Concord Music Group) including “Dazzling Blue,” “Rewrite,” “The Afterlife” and the album’s propulsive title track.
Joining Paul on the show is a stellar band of musicians including Cameroonian guitarist Vincent Nguini, guitarist/drummer Jim Oblon, pianist Mick Rossi, saxophonist/ keyboardist Andrew Snitzer, bassist Bakithi Kumalo, guitarist Mark Stewart, master percussionist Jamey Haddad and multi-instrumentalist Tony Cedras.
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Paul Simon – You’re The One (2000/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:39 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Folk Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Bros. Records
The disaster of Songs from the Capeman hit Paul Simon particularly hard, so he decided to quickly record a new album, his first proper collection of songs since 1990’s The Rhythm of the Saints — his first album in ten years, really. Nevertheless, if this album has a relative, it’s 1982’s Hearts and Bones, since it’s a deliberately low-key, insular record, especially when compared to the sweeping worldbeat explorations of Graceland and Rhythm. But where Hearts and Bones was a singer/songwriter album, no two ways about it, You’re the One illustrates the influence of its predecessors, but it’s not showy about it. The African and South American rhythms are as much a foundation of Simon’s music as folk is, and his compositions reflect it, boasting surprisingly tricky rhythms that carry through to his melodies themselves. That, combined with Simon’s determination to meet aging head-on, makes You’re the One a bit of an acquired taste, especially since its compositions are never overtly accessible and melodic — they’re all tone poems, driven as much by tone and lyric as song itself. This all results in a record that may be a little too deliberately low-key and elliptical for most tastes, especially since it demands full concentration even from serious fans. But this does reward close listening, and even if it doesn’t shine as brilliantly as Hearts and Bones (his most underappreciated record), it does share some similarities in that it’s an unassumingly intellectual record that feels like it was made without an audience in mind. Which means it’s more interesting than successful, but interesting can have its own rewards. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic
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Paul Simon – There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973/2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 50:08 minutes | 940 MB | Genre: Folk Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Columbia Records
“Retaining the buoyant musical feel of Paul Simon, but employing a more produced sound, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon found Paul Simon writing and performing with assurance and venturing into soulful and R&B-oriented music. Simon returned to the kind of vocal pyrotechnics heard on the Simon & Garfunkel records by using gospel singers. On ‘Love Me Like a Rock’ and ‘Tenderness’ (which sounded as though it could have been written to Art Garfunkel), the Dixie Hummingbirds sang prominent backup vocals, and on ‘Take Me to the Mardi Gras,’ Reverend Claude Jeter contributed a falsetto part that Garfunkel could have handled, though not as warmly. For several tracks, Simon traveled to the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios to play with its house band, getting a variety of styles, from the gospel of ‘Love Me Like a Rock’ to the Dixieland of ‘Mardi Gras.’ Simon was so confident that he even included a major ballad statement of the kind he used to give Garfunkel to sing: ‘American Tune’ was his musical State of the Union, circa 1973, but this time Simon was up to making his big statements in his own voice.”
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Paul Simon – The Rhythm Of The Saints (1990/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:57 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Folk Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Legacy Recordings
Though he recorded the album’s prominent percussion tracks in Brazil, Paul Simon fashioned The Rhythm of the Saints as a deliberate follow-up to the artistic breakthrough and commercial comeback that was the South Africa-tinged Graceland. Several of the musicians who had appeared previously were back, along with some of the New York session players who had worked with Simon in the 1970s, and the overall sound was familiar to fans of Graceland. Further, Simon’s nonlinear lyrical approach was carried over: he continued to ruminate about love, aging, and the onslaught of modern life in disconnected phrases and images that created impressions rather than telling straightforward stories. But where Graceland had seamlessly merged its styles into an exuberant whole, The Rhythm of the Saints was less well digested. Those drum tracks never seemed integrated effectively into what had been dubbed over them; at the same time, they tended to lock the songs into musical patterns that reined them in from the kind of excitement the South African music on Graceland generated, making the melodies harder to grasp. At the same time, Simon sang his lyrics in a less involved way, which sometimes made them seem like collections of random lines rather than the series of striking observations Graceland seemed to contain. No Paul Simon album could be lacking in craft or quality, and The Rhythm of the Saints was a typically tasteful effort. But this time around, Simon hadn’t quite succeeded in bringing the wide-ranging elements together; the album sold about half as many copies as Graceland (that is to say, a none-too-shabby two million), and that’s about right — where Graceland was an exotic adventure, The Rhythm of the Saints was more of an anthropology lesson. –William Ruhlmann
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Paul Simon – The Essential Paul Simon (2007/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:31:09 minutes | 2,79 GB | Genre: Folk Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Legacy Recordings
Released five years after Warner’s last Paul Simon comp, the single-disc The Paul Simon Collection: On My Way, Don’t Know Where I’m Goin’, the double-disc The Essential Paul Simon is a full 17 tracks heftier than its predecessor and contains all but one of its 19 songs (MIA is the latter-day “Love,” which only hardcore fans will recognize as from You’re the One, and they’re not quite the market for this set anyway). It’s also slimmer than the 1993 box Paul Simon 1964/1993, which spanned three discs but also encompassed his ’60s recordings with Art Garfunkel, plus a single the duo recorded as Tom & Jerry, along with selections from his solo debut, The Paul Simon Songbook — it was ambitious, where this compilation is efficient, picking up after the parting of ways with Garfunkel and running straight through until 2006’s Surprise. The sequencing isn’t strictly chronological — some songs are shuffled around for effect, with “Still Crazy After All These Years” closing the first, while “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” is cleverly followed by the zydeco stomp “That Was Your Mother” — but it roughly divides into having the first disc devoted to the ’70s and early ’80s, the second devoted to Graceland and beyond. Some might argue that there’s too heavy of a Graceland presence here — a whopping six tracks, over half the album — but it is his biggest album and functions as a nice transition between his better-known ’70s hits and the more esoteric but frequently compelling work that he’s done since. And, unlike The Paul Simon Collection, The Essential Paul Simon is designed to introduce fellow travelers to the interesting work he’s done since Graceland, as the second disc emphasizes that quite greatly, and it does a good job of it, while also providing a good summary of his best-known (and much of his best) solo work. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
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Paul Simon – Surprise (2006/2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 45:19 minutes | 550 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Legacy Recordings
Released in May of 2006, Surprise is Paul Simon’s eleventh studio album. It was well-received by critics and featured the singles “Father and Daughter”, and “Outrageous”. The album peaked at #14 on the US Billboard 200 Chart.
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Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All These Years (1975/2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 45:18 minutes | 820 MB | Genre: Folk Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Legacy Recordings
The third new studio album of Paul Simon’s post-Simon & Garfunkel career was a musical and lyrical change of pace from his first two, Paul Simon and There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Where Simon had taken an eclectic approach before, delving into a variety of musical styles and recording all over the world, Still Crazy found him working for the most part with a group of jazz-pop New York session players, though he did do a couple of tracks (“My Little Town” and “Still Crazy After All These Years”) with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section that had appeared on Rhymin’ Simon and another (“Gone at Last”) returned to the gospel style of earlier songs like “Loves Me Like a Rock.” Of course, “My Little Town” also marked a return to working with Art Garfunkel, and another Top Ten entry for S&G. But the overall feel of Still Crazy was of a jazzy style subtly augmented with strings and horns. Perhaps more striking, however, was Simon’s lyrical approach. Where Rhymin’ Simon was the work of a confident family man, Still Crazy came off as a post-divorce album, its songs reeking of smug self-satisfaction and romantic disillusionment. 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. But elsewhere, as on “Have a Good Time,” the singer’s cynicism seemed unearned. Still, as out of sorts as Simon may have been, he was never more in tune with his audience: Still Crazy topped the charts, spawned four Top 40 hits, and won Grammys for Song of the Year and Best Vocal Performance.
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