![]() ![]() Even back in his One Direction days, Styles cited Simon as a touchstone. Listen to Harry Styles ’ turn of phrase and poetic lyrics, and hints of Simon’s influence are evident. In advance of the GRAMMY salute to Simon next week, here are five artists that credit the songwriter as a key to their musical education. For example, Kid Cudi sampled "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" on his debut mixtape A Kid Named Cudi in the referentially titled "50 Ways to Make a Record." In a Forbes Q&A, Canadian songwriter Donovan Woods cites "Obvious Child" as his all-time favorite. Singer-songwriters, pop stars, country artists and rappers all claim Simon as a musical mentor. Simon’s contemporaries are not the songwriter’s only fans: The writer of iconic songs such as "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "Graceland," "The Boxer," and "50 Ways to Lose Your Lover," has generations of artists as worshippers of his art who continue to discover his deep catalog. 21 on CBS, Elton John calls him "one of the greatest songwriters of all time" - high praise from an artist with 35 GRAMMY nominations and five wins. In a clip from "Homeward Bound: A GRAMMY Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon," airing Dec. The accolades and awards are endless: a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, a 16-time GRAMMY winner, multiple recordings in the GRAMMY Hall of Fame and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy to name just a few. Generations have sung Simon’s songs - finding joy in their playful rhythms and sorrow in their beauty. These compositions are like old friends they linger long after the needle lifts or the stream ends. He incorporated these rhythms and instrumentation into his melodies, and then added poetic lyrics to create character-driven narratives. An innovator - not just a folk singer - Simon’s curiosity led to constantly discovering new soundscapes. For nearly six decades, the New Yorker has gifted his songs to the world. ![]() It happened toward the end, in a cover of “Words,” the Bee Gees hit from 1968 - a song about being powerless but desirous, like many of her own.Paul Simon is a living legend. But when she sang and played solo, things looked up. The band shrank her, and the show felt a little mechanical. Leventhal on lead guitar, with his cropped country lines. Colvin’s small backup band, including Mr. Thursday’s show was a little overdefined by Ms. The problem with “These Four Walls,” which is a pretty good Shawn Colvin record, is that it’s an ever-deepening comfort zone: a further refining of the Tom Petty-like roots-rock sound and the Texas folk-country style of the 1970’s. Written with John Leventhal, the guitarist and producer with whom she has worked off and on for 25 years, the new songs put their tightly wound lyrics in fairly mundane settings. But for the most part the songs acidly refuse to dignify the subject by naming it. Colvin’s grown-up audience very much wants to hear. These songs, of course, are in one way or another about coming to terms with middle age, and this is a subject Ms. “The men in hats, the boys on bikes, the perfect girls, the baby dykes/The superstars, the blighted ones/I went out to face them one by one.”) (“I went out to face the wilderness,” she sang. In “Summer Dress” a woman puts on something gauzy and liberating before going outside, but she might as well be wearing a flak jacket. These are more privately enacted messes: the passive-aggressive voice at the center of “Fill Me Up,” who needs attention and inviolate space in equal measures and talks to a new friend with a mixture of threat and desire (“I know where you live/ And I know who you are/ Don’t get too close and don’t go too far”). Their protagonists weren’t necessarily time bombs, like the character in “Sunny Came Home,” her 1997 hit about a woman who burns her own house down because she can’t think of a reason not to. They were mostly songs from her new record, “These Four Walls,” to be released Tuesday by Nonesuch. ![]() Fifty now and athletically built, she articulates every little note of a vocal run through a tight mouth and draws precise details of rhythm and sound out of her acoustic guitar, chopping and bumping the strings with her fingers or the heel of her hand.īut in almost every song she sang at Joe’s Pub on Thursday night, there lived a vexed character who was coming off track and about to get stuck in a grim psychological loop. Shawn Colvin looks and sounds well put-together, a confident performer getting things done. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |