1/15/2024 0 Comments Call me al![]() Then it has a chorus that you can’t understand what is he talking about – “You can call me Betty, and Betty, you can call Me Al.” You don’t know what I’m talking about, but I don’t think it’s bothersome. Too many things are coming the music is coming, the rhythm is coming all kinds of information that the brain is sorting out You’re not going to come in there and work real hard right away. You have to be a good host to people’s attention span. They’re going to sit down, get settled in their seat. In fact, you have to wait for the audience. You don’t have to kill them you don’t have to grab them by the throat with the first line And the other thing that I try to remember, especially if a song is long, is: You have plenty of time. So you want to have that first line that has a lot of options to get you going. It’s like a baseball diamond there’s more and more space out here as opposed to like, because if it’s like this at this point in the song, you’re out of options. I always have this image in my mind of a road that goes like this:, so that the implication is that the directions are pointing outward.] “You Can Call Me Al” starts very ordinary, almost like a joke like the structure of a joke cliche “There’s a rabbi, a minister and a priest….” “Two Jews walk into a bar…” “A man walks down the street…” That’s what I was doing there.īecause how you begin a song is one of the hardest things. ![]() So I started to try and work with more feelings around with words because the sound of the record was so good, you could move feelings. To let the words tumble this way and that way, and sometimes I’d increase the rhythm of the words so that they would come by you and then when a phrase was sort of different and came by you so quickly that all you could get was the feeling. Whereas in Graceland, I tried to do it where you wouldn’t notice it, where you sort of passed the line and then it was over. I think in Hearts and Bones, you could feel it was coming. So by the time I got to Graceland, I was trying to let that kind of enriched language flow naturally in the course of it, so that you wouldn’t really notice it as much. “A Train in the Distance” is in itself that kind of speech: “ Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance everybody thinks it’s true.” That is imagery, and that’s the title. But on Hearts and Bones, there’s more of that. It didn’t have anything to do with logic or anything I don’t know where it came from. That was a technique that I was learning. So the thing would go along smoothly, then some image would come out that was interesting, then it would go back to this very smooth conversational thing. I was trying to learn how to be able to write vernacular speech and then intersperse it with enriched language, and then go back to vernacular. What you’re determined to say is filled with all your rationalizations and your defenses, and all of that what you want to say to the world. You’ll find out much more about what you’re thinking that way than you will if you’re determined to say something. You want your mind to wander and to pick up words and phrases, and fool around with them and drop them.īecause as soon as your mind knows that it’s on, and it’s supposed to produce some lines, either it doesn’t or it produces things that are very predictable.Īnd that’s why I say I’m not interested in writing something that I thought about I’m interested in discovering where my mind wants to go or what object it wants to pick up. It’s a very pleasant feeling if you like playing ball, and while you do it, your mind kind of wanders, and that’s really what you want to happen. ![]() PAUL SIMON: The act of throwing a ball and catching a ball is so natural and calming.
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