THE GIFT.(Paul Simon, his career, and his songwriting process)(Biography)

Last spring, shortly before Paul Simon began rehearsing his band for a tour of Europe, he wrote three fragments of music--the first to occur to him in a year and a half. It was as long a dry period as he had ever been through. I went one night to a baseball game with him, and, going home in his car, he said, "The melodies have started to come. It's a relief."

Songwriters sometimes describe the sensation of songs arriving nearly intact. Simon has had this experience (the shower, "Still Crazy After All These Years"), but not often. His talent is more the patient and painstaking kind than the ecstatic. Songwriting, he says, is "trial and error repeated almost endlessly." A song usually takes him three months to finish. Typically, when he concludes a body of work, he thinks that he has depleted his resources, and that they won't be replenished. "I always feel that the situation is serious," he said in the car. "I'm in a vacuum, it's a dearth, and then there's something--a few notes, a phrase--and I say, 'I guess there's something,' but it's so small that I don't even know whether to count it."

Simon regards writing songs as the effort to find form for sounds he hears in his head. "Maybe ten, fifteen years ago," he said, "I realized that what I was fascinated with, couldn't explain, was sound--that you can't really say why a combination of sounds is moving or feels really good and right--and the whole game was: Can I get the sounds in my head on tape?" His driver brought the car to a stop at a light. Simon looked out the window. "I should get ready to work," he said softly. "You go into training--you play more, think more, listen more--instead of fretting over why you're not hearing the melodies."

To rehearse, Simon put the new work aside. The last time he did that, three years ago, he had five songs under way when he left them to prepare for a tour with Bob Dylan. Several months passed, the tour was over. Visiting a friend in New Mexico, he listened to recordings of the songs--he hadn't yet written any words--and was very pleased. Then he realized that he no longer felt any vestige of the impulse that had supplied them.

"I thought they had come from an inspired place," he said, "and I was just furious with myself for interrupting the work. What a fool I'd been, I thought, because I had just arrogantly assumed that the inspiration would return when I wanted it to. Then I thought, God, I have to get the rest. Because five tracks is only half an album. Of course five songs is half an album, but what if the point was: This was a level of joy in creating that you always hoped to attain. You think the experience involves ten because you need ten for the marketplace. Maybe you should just appreciate the experience, maybe that was the point, and there won't be any more." He sighed. "Anyway, another couple of months went by. I just had to wait."

The feeling of joy eventually returned. Many of the lyrics uncharacteristically came to him so quickly that he felt as if he were "taking dictation." After he had recorded the songs (on "You're the One," his latest CD, released in 2000), he took the tapes to Los Angeles and played them for the executives at his record company. "They were nice, respectful--it's a great honor and so on--but they didn't actually understand," he said. "Or at least I thought they didn't understand. That record was hypnotic, in its way, and they were thinking more about 'speed and impact.' "

On his way home, Simon stopped at his friend's house in New Mexico, and while he was there the company's response began to unsettle him. "I thought, Why am I so desperately wanting to enter the marketplace? And then I said to myself, with a couple of synaptic leaps that I'm leaving out, 'You're just a big liar. And I know what the lie is.' " The voice reprimanding him had the tone of an Old Testament figure. " 'This is Judgment Day, and there's no defense,' it announced. 'I'm going to tell you a deep truth, and you're going to listen. You made this thing that you received partly as a gift, and you took it immediately to the marketplace without sufficiently appreciating it. And when you intuited that the marketplace wasn't going to accept it you knew right away that you had no business taking such a thing there. The gift was the point.' "