Paul Simon – Suprise

After All These Years: Songwriting great makes stunning comeback
Paul Simon is 64 years old. That’s a lot of water—troubled or otherwise—under the bridge, and the temptation is to view him as a pleasant but irrelevant anachronism. The truth is he hasn’t released a good album since 1990’s Rhythm of the Saints, and his last sighting—the sweet but ultimately slight “Father and Daughter” from the Wild Thornberrys soundtrack—didn’t exactly inspire visions of past greatness. And that’s why Surprise lives up to its title. Co-produced by Simon and Brian Eno (U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie) and mixed by Tchad Blake (Tom Waits, Phish, Los Lobos), the 11 songs here re-establish Simon as one of our best songwriters, and they masterfully probe the uneasy malaise and melancholy that has always characterized his finest work.
Surprise is Simon’s most unabashedly autobiographical work since 1983’s Hearts and Bones. He sings about his wife, his children and the hole in his soul that seems unable to be filled. He looks for answers in family and God, but the answers are complicated, and they resonate with unresolved dilemmas. On “Sure Don’t Feel Like Love” Simon’s deceptively cheery melody masks a sucker punch as he ponders the chemistry of teardrops—mere electrolytes and salt—and why that chemistry doesn’t even begin to explain the calculus of sorrow and regret. On “I Don’t Believe” he wonders why the idyllic, sun-dappled family times are so ephemeral, and why the next day always dawns grey and bleak. Eno wraps these conundrums in his patented ambient gauze, which perfectly mirrors the disquieting, ruminative songwriting. Bill Frisell’s guitars and Herbie Hancock’s keyboards peek through occasionally, but it’s Eno’s production, and Simon’s impressive acoustic fingerpicking—again, his best since Hearts and Bones—that mark this album, sonically.