I have just listened to Miracle and Wonder, Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam’s extraordinary audio portrait of Paul Simon. It is based on some 30 hours of conversation with Simon and sets itself the ambitious task of understanding how someone from Queens could produce “near-perfect songs” over a career of more than six decades. I enjoyed it enormously. But I kept waiting.
Gladwell naturally spends time on the monuments: The Sound of Silence, The Boxer, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Graceland. They belong in any account of Paul Simon. But chapter after chapter, I waited for my Paul Simon to turn up. I was 16 when I first heard ‘Like a Rock’ – a song hardly mentioned – Gladwell was 7 when he first heard Bridge over Troubled Water -discussed in detail.
Where was Bleecker Street, that astonishingly mature song from the first Simon and Garfunkel album: Wednesday Morning 3:00 a.m.? Where was Benedictus? Where was the guitar playing—not simply the songwriting—of Anji? Why did we not hear about Davy Graham? What about the deceptively effortless (The) 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy), At the Zoo, or the early protest song He Was My Brother?
And above all, where was Peace Like a River?
If someone asked me to demonstrate Paul Simon’s greatness, I might start there. And much later I would want The Capeman represented by something like Satin Summer Nights. These aren’t footnotes to Simon’s career for me. They are part of the evidence.
Which raises an interesting question. When any two people who greatly admire the same artist choose completely different evidence for his greatness, which one has better taste or insight?
I think the answer may be: neither.
Taste and insight are normally treated as elements of a ranking system. We imagine there is a great invisible scoreboard on which The Boxer is an objectively more important achievement than Peace Like a River. Critics create canons, greatest-hits albums reinforce them, streaming numbers confirm them and eventually biography organizes a life around them.
But that isn’t quite how we actually experience music.
A song enters our lives at a particular moment. A guitar phrase catches us. An obscure album track says something that the famous single never did. We hear something in a song that perhaps wasn’t even uppermost in the mind of the person who wrote it.
Gladwell and Headlam themselves seem interested in precisely this mystery. Their portrait is not simply biography; it asks about creativity and about what makes artistic work endure. And the later special edition carries a wonderfully appropriate idea in its epilogue: “The Listener Completes The Song.”
That may explain my faux frustration with the audiobook better than any disagreement about taste.
I kept waiting for Gladwell to complete Paul Simon’s songs the way I had completed them.
He couldn’t.
Nor could I complete them the way Gladwell did.
And that tells us something important about genius. Genius may be what remains after taste has finished arguing
A merely good songwriter can produce several songs almost everyone agrees are good. A great songwriter can produce enough of them to fill a concert.But perhaps a genius produces such an enormous field of interesting work that two knowledgeable admirers can walk through it, choose quite different flowers, and still make equally convincing bouquets.
That is Paul Simon.
My disappointment with Miracle and Wonder therefore gradually became evidence for its central proposition.
Gladwell could spend nearly six hours examining Simon’s creativity—the audiobook grew out of some 30 hours of recorded conversation—and still leave out songs that I regard as indispensable.
That isn’t a defect in the book.
It is a measure of the subject.
There is another wrinkle, however. Miracle and Wonder isn’t simply Gladwell imposing his interpretation on an absent artist. Simon participated extensively in the project. He talked, played guitar, demonstrated ideas and discussed his creative process. Gladwell and Headlam travelled to record him, and the finished work incorporates archival recordings and new performances.
So when one of my favourites doesn’t appear, I can’t confidently complain, “Gladwell doesn’t understand Simon.” Simon was sitting there.
Perhaps Simon doesn’t organize his own career the way I do either.
And why should he?
The artist remembers making the song. The critic hears its place in a career. The listener remembers living with it.
Those are three different forms of ownership.
Paul Simon may remember the technical or emotional problem he was trying to solve. Gladwell hears a clue to the nature of creativity. I hear Peace Like a River and think: there it is.
None cancels the others.
That may ultimately be the difference between taste, talent, insight and genius.
Taste tells us which songs we love.
Talent makes songs worth loving.
Genius creates so many different ways into the work that, sixty years later, we can still disagree passionately about where the best entrance is.
So perhaps the songs Gladwell missed are not really missing at all.
They are the songs he left for the rest of us.