The Myth of Fingerprints

From Paul Simon’s landmark Graceland, “You Can Call Me Al” is quintessential Simon. It’s whimsical, rhythmically infectious, poetic and conversational, all before it expands into a whole other realm.

As Simon says ‘as a lyricist, my job is to find out what it is that I’m thinking. Even if it’s something that I don’t want to be thinking.

I was trying to learn how to be able to write vernacular speech and then intersperse it with enriched language, and then go back to vernacular. So the thing would go along smoothly, then some image would come out that was interesting, then it would go back to this very smooth conversational thing. That was a technique that I was learning. 

It didn’t have anything to do with logic or anything; I don’t know where it came from.”

I feel much the same about working with the language of abstract art!  I don’t know where it comes from, but I love to combine colours, shapes, textures and unique compositions to create ‘songs’ that appear as interesting imagery.