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.' "

Simon paused. "It got worse," he went on. " 'You don't like that?' the voice said. 'Then atone. Be a better person. You're lucky that this didn't occur on your deathbed, so that it would be the last thought you had.' ''

Several weeks went by before something in him relaxed, and he thought, You exaggerate. You were born with a talent and you worked hard at it, and the result gave people a lot of pleasure, and no matter what you did that was wrong you can't throw that out. You didn't do it to give people pleasure. You did it to see if you could make the sounds in your imagination come out on tape.

The insight was followed, even so, by the year and a half of drought, during which Simon couldn't listen to anyone's music, especially his own, and he felt that he might not write any songs again.

Simon is less nomadic than musicians often are. What keeps him mostly at home is his wife, the singer Edie Brickell, who is from Texas, and their three young children. Nevertheless, he travels frequently. Last spring, he and his family spent ten days in Jamaica; he went to London for a week to visit Harper, his oldest son, from his first marriage, who plays guitar in a rock-and-roll band; he went to Memphis to meet Joseph Shabalala, the leader of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the Zulu singing group that appears on Simon's 1986 album "Graceland"; he went a few times to his house by the ocean at the eastern end of Long Island; he made trips to Connecticut to see how the contractors were doing in renovating a house that he was moving to in the fall so that his children could have a life in the country; and he and his wife went to Venice to celebrate ten years of marriage. The rest of the time, he kept to a fairly regular schedule. He took the kids to school, then came home and worked with a physical trainer for two and a half hours; then he played guitar, then sometimes he picked up the kids. He has, of course, no material incentive to work. His offspring will be prosperous for generations. He is like the rich painters who have ranches or islands or palazzi and spend their days looking at sketches and patterns of clouds out the window or reading and staring at canvases. The time passes in a manner that is both leisurely and anxious. Eventually, he tells himself, "You've got to go to work. Try this, try that--it's not fun. Who said it was going to be fun? Go to work."

When Simon went to Memphis in May to meet Shabalala, I went, too. Shabalala wants to build a museum devoted to South African music, especially the kind he heard as a child on a farm; he is now sixty. Ladysmith Black Mambazo was performing near Memphis, and Simon thought that visiting the Delta Blues Museum, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, about an hour and a half south of the city, might suggest to Shabalala a plan. Simon also wanted to visit a health clinic in Clarksdale to which he gives a lot of money through the Children's Health Fund in New York, a charity he started with his friend Dr. Irwin Redlener.

It was raining when Simon and I left New Jersey in a small jet he had rented. When we got to Memphis, one of those jeeplike cars that make you feel as if you're seeing everything from the perspective of a man on horseback had been delivered to the terminal for us, and Simon drove. Leaving the airport, he took a wrong turn, and we wandered briefly before finding the tall buildings on the horizon.

Heading toward downtown, Simon described his last trip to Mississippi, some years back. "When I was recording with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section," he said, "we did this song called 'Take Me to the Mardi Gras,' and we wanted to get a Dixieland marching band for it, but we didn't want to go all the way to New Orleans. We were in Alabama, so we found this band and decided to meet them halfway, in Jackson, Mississippi, at a studio called Malaco Sound. When we get to Jackson, no one knows where Malaco Sound is. I pull into a gas station and ask…