The second installment in the Lasers in the Jungle track-by-track look at Surprise.
It’s difficult to imagine a songwriter whose output is as consistently satisfying as Paul Simon “locked in a struggle for the right combination – of words in a melody line,” as he sings jazzily, trailing the beat just enough. It’s easier to imagine Simon taking “ a walk along the riverbanks of my imagination,” as Surprise’s second track, “Everything About It Is A Love Song,” unravels gorgeously. By the time Simon sings of “golden clouds … shuffling the sunshine,” we’re off in another world.
And then, the we get the first exceptionally pleasant shift on an album that continues to delight, as Simon sings of someday returning, inevitably, from creativity and peacefulness, Brian Eno introduces a drumbeat that owes more to Brit House than South Africa or Brazil, whose rhythms have coloured Simon’s recordings and performances for two decades. “If I ever get back to the twentieth century,” Simon sings, “I guess I’ll have to pay off some debts.” On the BBC’s The Big Show, Simon pointed out that, as songwriter, he had given himself an escape clause of sorts – what with the twentieth century being over. That said, “Everything” introduces the theme of atonement, which recurs on “I Don’t Believe” and “Another Galaxy.” Here, he writes about everyone’s having to account for the things they’ve done and the opportunities missed – to help oneself and others, to stand up against injustice, perhaps, or comfort those in affliction. To love and lose.
Before you know it, the music shifts again; we’ve travelled from peaceful creativity through self-reflection to disappointment: “we don’t mean to mess things up, but mess them up we do.” Eno’s touch, again, is measured and spot-on; listen to the electronic sweep right before Simon sings “surprise, surprise, surprise.”
And suddenly we’ve returned to our initial two-chord progression, though the key has changed (almost unknowingly), back from another world to a harsh December, “frost creeping over the pond.” The songwriter reflects on his lot in life, thinking ahead, perhaps to the moment when the soul is freed from its bodily master, “far above the golden clouds.” Does salvation (“rescue”) lie in atonement? If we really shed our physical vessels, return “as a tree, or a crow, or even the wind-blown dust,” can we reach a higher plane, where life is a memory, “far above the golden clouds”? Or is “Everything” really a song about creativity and the imaginative life? Lyrically and musically, there is a strong link to “Hurricane Eye,” the best track on Simon’s last album, 2000’s You’re The One, another elusive work that dealt with writer’s block, the contentment of familial bonds and the grandness of life. Musically, both “Everything” and “Hurricane” can be broken down into three distinct parts (perhaps the fact that the music travels so far is why I enjoy them both so much). The early part builds off a simple riff (the two-chord guitar progression in “Everything” and Mark Stewart’s banjo part in “Hurricane”), followed by a transitional riff (those great drums on “Everything” and the “over the bridge of time” section of “Hurricane”).
And then comes the middle part – the moment in each song where things take a somewhat despairing turn. In “Hurricane,” Simon repeats the phrase “peaceful as a hurricane eye” over and over, complementing the hiccupping 7/8 rhythm, set against a background of fuzzy guitars that would sound right at home on Surprise. In “Everything,” a manic, guitar riff (and a wonderful bassline) support lyrics about relationships gone bad, when a photograph of happier times serves as contrast, not comfort.
Finally we enter a third portion, using elements of the first – the two chords in “Everything” and the banjo in “Hurricane” – to close the musical loop. “Hurricane” includes a great instruction and ends with Simon thinking on a galaxy level: “You wanna be a writer? Don’t know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen … I’ve been away for a long time, and it looks like a mess around here. And I’ll be away for a long time, so here’s how the story goes.” Similarly, on the Surprise song, the words of wisdom take us beyond the physical world: “The earth is blue. And everything about it is a love song.”
And it is – perhaps the meaning of these two songs, the two most elusive of Simon’s recent compositions, is that creativity and peacefulness are the blessings of life, that despair and uncertainty can lead to contentment, and that the way to get there, as Simon told Nightline recently, is to sing a love song. Ultimately, maybe Surprise’s second track is as billed: a love song to the world.
Simon himself summed it up quite nicely in an interview with the Newark Star-Ledger’s Jay Lustig:
“You look back at the whole thing from some distant place,” he says, “and the Earth looks so beautiful and blue. Then you say, ‘Well, it’s all about love.’ Love that worked out, love that didn’t work out, all the manifestations of love, love that turns to hate and all that.
“If you don’t stay in the big picture and you’re right in the midst of things … well then, you feel it with an intensity that’s not at all mellow. You’re in the throbbing life of the 21st century.
“But if you go back and forth between the two views, it creates a kind of a hum. It makes a kind of a sound. And if you can capture that sound, then you could say, ‘That’s the way I hear things.’ That’s about all you could say. You can’t say, ‘I understand it.’ But you can say, ‘That’s the way I hear it.’”
Postscript: One shouldn’t write about “Everything” without mentioning the wonderful guitar lines provided by Bill Frisell, who explores the reaches of his instrument and the song like a spaceship kissing the atmosphere. A truly inspired performance.
