Paul Simon and the eight ingredients of genius

Malcolm Gladwell’s new audiobook?- a collection of interviews with and about Paul Simon - is spectacular. Gladwell uses Simon's half century of artistry as a canvas on which to explore the creative process. Simon talks and plays guitar, while Gladwell asks questions and connects dots to reveal the secrets of his continual reinvention. The result is a recipe for genius, with ingredients evident in Simon, but available to all:

Memory - Simon has an encyclopedic memory of the music he's encountered throughout his life. It's not a memory of facts and data. It's a memory of feelings; the feeling he got listening to the slap back echo of a Johnny Cash record, the rhythm of Bo Diddley, and the voices he heard singing on street corners in Queens. "His memory is prodigious," marveled Gladwell. "It seemed like there were thousands of songs in his head and thousands more bits of songs, components, which appeared to have been broken down and stacked like cordwood in his imagination."

Synthesis - Armed with that arsenal of memories, Simon remixes them, too. Gladwell uses the example of Take Me to the Mardi Gras, a song in which Jamaican reggae, New Orleans brass, Harlem gospel, Alabama R&B, and maybe even a bissel of Yiddish collide to create something entirely new. As Gladwell observes:

Your cultural identity is something you get to hold loosely. It influences you, but it doesn’t define you. You’re free to roam and window shop and come up with your own combination. That idea is something you hear a lot in Paul Simon’s music.

Curiosity - Simon wrote The Sounds of Silence at 22, Bridge Over Troubled Water at 27, Kodachrome at 32, Late in the Evening at 38, Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes at 44, The Obvious Child at 49, Bernadette at 56, and Questions for the Angels at 70.?A key to that longevity is his quest to discover new sounds and combinations. He's constantly wondering "what makes it sound that way?" "what time signature is that?" "how did they record that?"

Association - Gladwell marvels at Simon's ability to draw association between seemingly disparate musical expressions: "Simon's exacting memory for sounds and themes meant that he could see patterns, where others could only see difference." A friend gave Simon a tape he listened to in his car for a month. What he heard on that tape were elements of Sun Records, and doo wop, and country guitars. That tape was called Accordion Jive Hits No. 2. It was a collection of songs from South Africa. It was the beginning of his journey to Graceland.

Experimentation - Graceland is my favorite album ever. It's my favorite work of art in any medium ever. It's the result of Simon indulging his curiosity, finding associations that pleased him, then traveling halfway around the world to see if he could do anything with it. Throughout his career, Simon would seek out creators that had something he wanted to recapture; to remix; to make his own.

Meticulousness - I prefer this word to perfectionism. Perfectionism implies stubbornness. Meticulousness focuses on the attention paid to details. Simon was absolutely meticulous with his work. The Boxer is a five minute song. He spent one hundred hours recording it. I'm no Paul Simon, but I have my moments of meticulousness. I've been working on this article for a month.

Fallibility - Sometimes, the experiments would go nowhere. One night, he was driving home with his wife, Edie Brickell, when he heard an instrument he had never heard before. It was a theorbo, a stringed instrument popular in the sixteenth century. So of course Simon tracked down one of the only people on the planet still playing one, a woman in France. He hopped across the pond, recorded with her for a few days, and nothing came of it. That's not only fine by Simon, it's necessary: "It's all trial and error. There's no reason to be upset about the errors...There's going to be more errors than successes, so when they come, you just put it away as a piece of information." he says.

Other times, he was simply stuck. One time, when he was in the middle of writing a song, Simon went on the Dick Cavett Show. He sung the first lines of the first verse, hummed a few more, then told Cavett "I was stuck there." Cavett asked "What makes you stuck?" to which Simon shrugged, "everywhere I went led me to where I didn't want to be." Spoiler alert: he finished the song. It was Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Taste - Gladwell calculates taste as "the combination of memory and judgement." He continues "And if you've been making deposits to your memory bank for decades, each of which is labeled, digested, and attached to the appropriate emotion, then how good is your taste by that point? Good enough to get you to Graceland."

Gladwell summarizes the work at the end reflecting on what he, and we as listeners, just experienced: "He came in and talked and played and provided us with a model of what it means to be alive as an artist. To persist. To create work that lasts. To write songs that people listen to and then say 'When I thought about it, to my amazement, I started to cry.' Paul Simon is a master craftsman, but that description doesn’t do him justice. Because behind that craft, there is intention. Heart. An ability to move us where we need to be moved. Is that what genius is? I think so."

What other ingredients are in your recipe for genius?