Paul Simon: The Complete Albums Collection

By JOHN KELMAN, Published: January 11, 2014
If the history books were to be closed on singer/songwriter Paul Simon's career today, he'd have already left a legacy more than sufficient to ensure a substantial chapter. While other emergent songwriters of his day—Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman amongst them—have clearly evolved over the years, there's been an underlying approach that's remained consistent across, in many cases, half a century. That's not to dismiss or denigrate these icons of song, only to say that Simon has emerged as a songwriter who has not just grown as a wordsmith and composer of catchy, memorable music (as they all have); he's the only one to have looked at the world around him, studying and subsuming advancing technology, diverse genres and, perhaps most importantly, the music of other cultures. It's a mindset Simon shares with the slightly younger British songwriter Peter Gabriel—despite their being completely different in their approaches—not just incorporating these diverse and sometimes disparate concepts into his music but, in the case of pan-cultural concerns, actually locating and working with many of the musicians he studied. 

Nowhere is this clearer than on The Complete Albums Collection, which collects almost every album Simon has released, starting with 1965's The Paul Simon Songbook (Columbia, 1965) through to his most recent studio record, So Beautiful Or So What (Hear Music, 2011). Only the two-CD/1-DVD Live in New York City (Hear Music, 2012), culled from the limited tour Simon launched in support of So Beautiful, is omitted. Over the course of 46 years, The Complete Albums Collection follows Simon as he moves from acoustic guitar-slinging folk singer to jazz-informed popster, African and Brazilian-tinged world traveler, electro-centric explorer and, finally, consolidator of everything that came before. 

The collection, housed in a pristine white box with magnets to keep the lid closed, places the 15 CDs, comprising 14 separate releases, in miniature (where relevant) replicas of the original vinyl covers, including the gatefold sleeves for albums like 1975's There Goes Rhymin' Simon (Warner Bros.), complete with lyrics—small but legible. Traversing Simon's career from the age of 23 through to the cusp of his 70th birthday, the box uses the 2004 expanded remasters of everything up to You're The One (Warner Bros., 2000), so that eleven of the albums include bonus tracks ranging from works-in-progress and demos to live performances, alternate versions of tunes with different lyrics and songs that never ultimately appeared on any of his recordings other than greatest hits packages. The box paints a picture of an artist for whom evolution is a constant, and whose ability to tell stories has grown from poetic but, perhaps, youthfully earnest and direct, to more sophisticated, allegorical and impressionistic. Simon may be marginally more prolific than Peter Gabriel, but his output has slowed down, with new studio recordings often five or six years apart; but, like Gabriel, what Simon now lacks in quantity—compared to his early years, where he seemed to be overflowing with ideas—he more than makes up for in quality. 


Paul Simon—The Paul Simon SongbookThe first album in the box, The Paul Simon Songbook (Columbia, 1965), is something of an oddity. Recorded that year after the first Simon & Garfunkel record, the all-acoustic Wednesday Morning, 3 AM (Columbia, 1964), failed to ignite as expected, Simon spent some time in England, where he found himself in demand as a coffeehouse singer. Songbook emerged from that experience, recorded at Columbia's London studio to satisfy then-increasing demands for an album by a growing number of British fans.
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