The Biographical Imperative: Reading Paul Simon like we’d read Taylor Swift

On her third AOTY Grammy, Taylor Swift has entered elite company with some of America’s greatest songwriters. The way we read Swift is gendered and somewhat modern: her ‘eras’ align with the aesthetics she presents, and stan culture has dissected every relationship she’s ever had until we’re all sure who or what inspired every song. What if we read these other Grammy royals this way? As a massive Paul Simon fan on the fringes of Taylor Swift twitter, I think this is a job for me. I know his catalogue well, have seen him live often, but I don’t know who the songs are about and have never considered the biographical imperative of writing, beyond placing him as a New Yorker and a touring musician. How does looking at Paul Simon in the same way we look at Taylor Swift change our view of either, or both, of them?

Art Garfunkel is Nathan Chapman

Developing a sound together, growing as an artist because of what your collaborator can do and where their musical interests lie, placing yourself firmly in a genre that you will break out of later. Both Swift and Simon chose their collaborators very young, and yet do not disavow what for many people would be juvenilia. Garfunkel and Chapman were quiet creatively in these partnerships, and Swift and Simon seem pushed by them to create in a way that suits their friends. The young writers created a comfortable environment and pushed the boundaries of the genre they were in, relying in their collaborators’ talents to bring them back to a marketable, recognisable style – for Garfunkel this was a vocal style, for Chapman this was an instrumental voice.

Art Garfunkel is also Jake Gyllenhaal

All Too Well is one of the most popular songs Swift has ever written, and also one of the most dissected – Maggie Gyllenhaal has indirectly denied being the sister in the song, fans are clamouring for the original 10-minute version in Swift’s rereleases, and it’s one of the high points of Swift’s live shows. It also sears the heart like Only Living Boy in New York. Both of these songs are transparently about the relationships the author was in the process of ending, and both gain an extra poignancy when we learn just how true they were. This creates an emotional connection between the listener and the writer where the listener empathises, feels seen, feels like they know exactly what happened in the specifics whilst the writers paint with broad brushes emotionally. Working relationships and romantic relationships are treated with equal weighting by both creators, and both songs give the listener an insight into pain, but also relief. The nuances and the specifics work together to create two of the all-time great songs.

Is Art Garfunkel also Joe Jonas and Katy Perry?

Some of Swift’s pettiest, most emotional breakup songs are widely perceived to be about Joe Jonas, to the point his new wife felt the need to comment on Swift’s ‘From The Vault’ work. Swift’s most famous feud was with Katy Perry. But after making her fights with them public she has publicly made up with them, sending handmade gifts to Perry’s baby and publicly apologised to Jonas. In the recording of Old Friends Live, Art Garfunkel says that he and Simon are “too old to fight” – and their collaboration was so significant that their reunion was a sellout global tour, decades after their first success, but for a younger fan like myself that highlights the bickering and public spats that defined their earlier careers.

Lulu Simon is Joe Alwyn

Some of the purest declarations of love in Simon’s songs are to his children, but Father and Daughter is especially clear, with lyrics telling us he’ll “Stand guard / Like the postcard / Of the golden retriever”, and, explicitly, “There could never be a father / Love his daughter more than I love you.” Its analogue in Swift’s catalogue has to be Peace, in which we hear Swift singing frankly about the burdens she brings to a relationship but also the positives she can bring – she wants a baby with this person, she would “die for [them] in secret”. Like Swift in Peace, Simon is using Father and Daughter to communicate the complex emotions he feels to this new person in his life and considering her potential feelings towards him. Both writers are aware of what they can give, but also that they are imperfect humans. They are lovesongs about what somebody can give, about complex relationships with simple feelings, rather than simply describing the beloved. In these two songs we get the clearest similarities between the two artists, as well as two profound and relatable experiences.

Kathy Chitty is also Joe Alwyn

Kathy and Paul reportedly broke up because she didn’t want to be famous (which makes it especially egregious that the Daily Mail has run a feature with a candid photograph telling its readers ‘What Happened to Kathy’. Leave that woman ALONE). Two of Simon and Garfunkel’s most famous songs are about the experiences Simon had with her, and he also references her in much later songs. Like Kathy, songs like Getaway Car that appear to reference the beginning of her relationship with Joe are written about events and emotions rather than telling him straight that she loves him, which is how Simon writes about Kathy. Their presence in songs is in road trips and conversations rather than grand declarations, and the Kathy and Joe presented to the listener are not the real Kathy and Joe so much as how they appear in the artists’ minds and memories.

Carrie Fisher is Karlie Kloss

The famous girl I want all the songs to be about. Yeah, Simon is divorced from Carrie by the time of I Know What I know, but who else it the witty woman at the cinematographer’s party? With Karlie there’s a whole well of online fans willing to annotate every lyric and liner note to tell me exactly how it could be about her – I’d do that for Carrie. I want to know how Simon felt about every high and low of his time with Carrie, and were their relationship now I would scour their twitter feeds and tabloid sightings to understand their love, like Gaylors do.

Scarborough Fair is Love Story

These are possibly my least favourite songs by both artists, and I’m not sorry. I think it shows that, although Swift did write Love Story, it’s a rewrite of Romeo and Juliet, because it’s derivative and sappy. The same for Scarborough Fair – because it’s not a Simon original he doesn’t shine through on it, and although they were both big hits which tapped into (and potentially even created) a genre’s pop moment, they are low points in the careers of two great lyricists.

Graceland is Cornelia Street

Only a truly great writer can put so much emotion and story into a place. Graceland and Cornelia Street take something the listener probably hasn’t experienced – I’ve never lived in Manhattan or taken a road trip with my 9-year-old son – and somehow brings in all the universal emotions of love, loss, fear, confusion. They ask, how do we move forward? What does the death of a relationship mean for the small, everyday choices we make on our commute? How can our changing circumstances affect how we read other people’s statements? Both of these songs are beautifully crafted pop songs with depths that reveal an inner turmoil which humanises the artists and demonstrates their skill at observing ordinary things and pulling out the extraordinary emotions with clever phrasing and musical pairings.

One Trick Pony is Lover

Chock full of bops, and after a lull period of popularity (one that history, frankly, should look on fondly – yes, I am a Reputation stan), answering the criticisms levelled at them head on, these albums prove the artists know who they are, as well as how they are perceived.

Still Crazy After All These Years is Folklore

I don’t think anybody expected Still Crazy to be the album it was. I don’t know if it would have exploded the internet in 1975, had that been a thing, but in the context of Simon’s career it feels huge in retrospect. The surprise reunion of Simon & Garfunkel, the songwriting is a high point of Simon’s career, and it sounds so different to the two previous albums. It gave us four hits, which for a man who had been famous for over a decade is impressive, and proves that Simon had mass-market appeal, even after the subculture he came from died. Still Crazy and Folklore come at about the same point in their careers: Swift and Simon have moved out of the genres that made them famous, they have grown into weaving fiction with personal facts in their songs deftly, they have chosen carefully who to work with, and these albums move their respective artists into an established part of the musical canon.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo are Max Martin

Developing a new sound and a new way of writing as an established artist is difficult. Simon’s Graceland album has sounds as diverse as pop, Cajun, and South African a capella styles, and he writes alongside musicians from other traditions to layer a new sound into his work, making one of the greatest records of all time and netting himself that third Grammy. Swift’s work with Max Martin taught her the same skills – to work differently to what she had previously accustomed, to take her strengths and her collaborators’ to create something unique. Both collaborations take the writers outside their comfort zones – for Simon, putting him in an entirely new musical tradition; for Swift, stripping back her lyrics until they are the simplest they can be – and both create an electrifying new sound that the artists eventually did move away from, but took what they learned and put it in their later material.

That multi-instrumentalist guy with ginger hair who tours with Simon is Bon Iver

The stamp of Bon Iver on Taylor’s later work is indelible – he doesn’t just sing on one or two songs, he arranges and consults and plays the banjo in the background. Mark Stewart (the ginger guy in question) could be Jack Antonoff for his work with other significant musicians (I believe I’ve also seen him live with Robert Plant), but I think his relationship with Simon is more like this one with Bon Iver – he is not a prominent collaborator, with Stewart playing I believe exclusively live, and Bon Iver not even using his trademark falsetto on Folklore, but despite them being in the background they add to the musical texture of Swift and Simon in a way that only they could. Simon and Swift know how to use their collaborators, to put them inside their own musical world and bend unique talents to suit their work. We have yet to see how Swift will tour her newest music, but Stewart allows Simon to give a more textured performance when he plays live, and understands what his performance needs to be in this space, like Bon Iver does on Swift’s album.

Why do I even care about this?

The biographical imperative is back, baby! After a half-century of post-structuralists ruling the roost, academia is back to teaching us that it isn’t just Derridean constructs that help us to understand how social structures come into the text, but also how writers see themselves and where readers and listeners place them. Maybe it’s just to do with where I am in my studies – as an undergraduate, you learn to relate to texts disregarding what the author thought, and perhaps even who they were, before getting to a postgraduate level where you add back in the society with an awareness of the text for its own merits. In other words, you need to go THROUGH the 1980s Paul Simon listening experience, where it doesn’t matter who he is so much as what he’s saying, BEFORE you can understand the relevance of how Taylor Swift fans in the 2010s experience her music. There is a value in the detachment that I’m sure Swift would envy, but we also lose something as a listener if we disregard the hows and whys of what Simon wrote came to be.

Exercises like this allow me to flex my intellectual muscles and explore how I place social structures into my work: I care about Swift and Simon’s thoughts on themselves only insofar as they are interpreted by their fans. My focus as an academic is on the reception of texts, as I believe that says more about society than the texts themselves. When we look at Simon like we do Swift, we can easily see how gender, technology, culture, money all come into play when we engage with an everyday art form like music, how these change our interpretation of Swift and Simon, and how these differences are not inherent to their body of work or the way they have lived their lives. If we want to trace Paul Simon’s famous exes through his music, we absolutely can; why do we only choose to do so for Swift? As a fan, I care about what I can gain from the music by choosing the ‘new historicist’ biographical imperative or the ‘structuralist’ view that the texts themselves speak, and I understand that I can approach the songs differently every time I listen to them; as an academic, though, it’s much more interesting to look at why and how these distinctions even exist. Both readings are valid and teach us something new, so why do we engage with only one?

It’s also a hope for me: Simon has continued touring and writing well into his 60s and 70s (Rewrite would be a career-best from anybody else, and I am worried that you haven’t heard it) and has been releasing albums for 54 years, building a career unparalleled by his contemporaries and the security that allows him to develop as an artist. His personal life has been a part of that, but the body of work speaks for itself; whilst Swift the personality can Speak Now, I hope that she can one day be assessed in the manner of Simon and have the biographical aspects re-discovered to add depth and nuance, without her music being defined by it. I think that in these two artists we have a demonstration of how the academicisation of art happens and how we can enjoy art, books, music – anything! – on multiple levels, and that we as the consumer are really who matters in the interpretation.