Released in 1973, Paul Simon’s third studio album was a real success, receiving very favorable reviews that were also echoed in the rankings of the time.
With this production, Simon managed to condense the best of his time at Simon & Garfunkel but adding his own style, which found its heyday in the early seventies.
In his second solo installment, in full creative euphoria, Paul Simon offers us a vital and sincere, ambitious and profound album, perhaps the highest quality of his pre-Graceland period, in which his great personality as a composer breaks through a varied range of styles, imprinting on all of them their characteristic mark. Once again, Simon decides to travel his own musical paths, away from both ephemeral fads and typical mechanized schemes.
An undeniable lyrical streak characterizes the lyrics on this album, albeit from voluntarily anti-rhetorical budgets, which allow Simon to combine, with the utmost balance, the colloquial and cult levels, and offer a handful of beautiful images, some of the great visual impact. Proof of this is magnificent texts such as those of Something So Right, American Tune or Take Me To The Mardi Gras.
This renewed lyricism, which constitutes the essential note of the album from the point of view of writing, is carried out without prejudice to the narrative forms, in which field Simon produces exceptional pieces, as simple and refined as they are rich in significant capacity (Loves I Like A Rock). Its extraordinary mastery of avoidance contributes, not a little, to the obtaining of these splendid fruits.
One of the emblematic of the album of his entire career. This album is not related to photography but rather that when we imagine situations, based on our memory (as if it were a Kodachrome camera), the world seems more beautiful and colorful than if we observe it as it really is, in certain gray aspects such as a too strict school education (always following the allegorical thread of the letter, eye!), for example.
For the umpteenth time, Paul uses a fine irony of a certain arcane cut, as in many of his other songs, although with a happy and sweetening rhythm, for this occasion.
Without a doubt, one of the huge bombings of Paul Simon alone since the single, title track became # 2 in the United States and # 1 in Canada and with the majority of the critics in favor of the album.
Listen to the full album below: