It was the summer of 1984, and things weren’t going well for Paul Simon. The year before, a blockbuster Simon and Garfunkel tour had ended in arguments. Even though his 1980 single “Late in the Evening” made the US Top 10, his last two albums hadn’t sold well, and his marriage to Carrie Fisher was starting to fall apart. In the middle of all that, the 43-year-old folk icon was steadily working on building a beach house at the far end of Long Island.
Many of Simon’s trips from Manhattan out to Montauk were accompanied by a bootleg tape of accordion-heavy mbaqanga—a South African music style with jazz rhythms and bright guitar chords—that a friend had given him. It was on those drives that the seeds of Graceland, the crown jewel of Simon’s discography, were planted. “Many of us, in that day and age, found a moment of self-reflection—of being able to go deep inside ourselves—when we were in the car on these road trips,” said Ashley Kahn, whose new book, Days of Miracle and Wonder, follows the making of Graceland. “If it wasn’t the radio, it was cassettes.”
Forty years on, Graceland remains the most nimble and joyful album Simon has ever made. It’s built around contributions from South African musicians whose “township jive” reminded Simon of the early rock and doowop records he heard as a kid in Queens. There are all kinds of musical detours—a trip to Louisiana inspired Simon to record with zydeco group Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters, while the song “All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints” features Los Lobos’ blend of norteño and rock. Simon is at his best when working with the resonant rhythms from Johannesburg.
Inspired by the bootleg, Simon booked jam sessions in Johannesburg with different bands—General MD Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters, Tao Ea Matsekha, the Boyoyo Boys—where he developed melodies and scribbled down lyrics as engineer Roy Halee recorded the groups’ grooves. Some of the songs that ended up on Graceland were built on top of these groups’ already-finished tracks, like “Gumboots,” a thrilling pop confection that Simon first heard as an instrumental on that tape. For Simon, whose process usually started with an acoustic guitar, this was a major shift in how he approached his craft. “He’s finding a way of building from the rhythm up; that, for him, was profoundly new,” said Kahn, who compared Simon’s new approach to hip-hop: “Start with the beat and match the words to the beat.”
In those February 1985 sessions, Simon found a surge of inspiration, but the harsh realities of South African apartheid loomed outside the studio doors. After dark, the Black musicians weren’t allowed on the streets of Johannesburg, nor were they allowed to use public transportation. As a result, a day of recording would reach an “uncomfortable time when the players couldn’t concentrate until they knew there might be a car to take them home,” Simon told Rolling Stone in 1986. In a sign of the backlash Graceland would later face, the manager of the Soul Brothers told Simon he believed recording in South Africa violated the United Nations’ 1980 boycott, which was passed to prevent the South African government from using culture as propaganda for apartheid.
Kahn believes that Simon had the musicians’ labor rights in mind. “He wanted to have them participate, he wanted them to be credited, and he wanted them to be compensated,” said Kahn, emphatically noting that Simon paid the South African musicians triple the daily rate of musicians in American unions. “Did he do it perfectly? No. But there wasn’t a set formula for how to approach this.” Simon has still faced backlash over the years about Graceland.Paul Simon’s songwriting credits on the album also included several musicians who performed on it, such as Los Lobos, Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters, and even guitarist Ray Phiri, who helped shape the title track. In response to accusations of cultural appropriation, supporters of Graceland have argued that Simon’s work in South Africa helped bring bands like Ladysmith Black Mambazo—who feature prominently on the dreamy “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”—to a wider audience.
Before the first recording sessions at Ovation Studios in Johannesburg, Simon spoke with calypso legend Harry Belafonte, who suggested he reach out to the African National Congress. Believing that the power of art outweighed political restrictions, Simon chose not to follow Belafonte’s advice. Months after Graceland was released, the UN’s special committee against apartheid criticized Simon and planned to add him to the list of artists who had broken the boycott. “They were looking for a coordinated message and a coordinated push, which is why the boycott was such an issue,” Kahn added. The UN later reversed its decision after Simon wrote to the committee, explaining that he had understood the ban to apply only to performing, not recording, and that he had no plans to perform in South Africa.
A lifelong tension between Simon’s intellectual and conversational sides runs through Graceland. He avoided writing overt anti-apartheid protest songs, but the unease from his time in South Africa seeps into tracks like “Homeless” and “The Boy in the Bubble,” which opens with an image of “soldiers by the side of the road” while the mix of famo-style accordion and bass hints at something ominous ahead. However, it’s Simon’s personal struggles—his failed marriage, his fears of being past his prime, and his anxieties about the information age—that he explores most deeply on Graceland, often through vivid, surreal imagery (like “lasers in the jungle”) or larger-than-life characters (such as “Fat Charlie the Archangel”).
“One image that always comes to mind is Paul in a room with a rubber ball—bouncing it, bouncing it, bouncing it—to reach a Zen-like state where lyrics start to flow,” Kahn said. “He’s already thinking about songwriting. The lyrics are there. He just needs to quiet all the other noise in his mind.”
Graceland‘s steady undercurrent of longing, sometimes expressed in simple lines like “You don’t feel you could love me but I feel you could,” delivered unexpected emotional punches. On the album’s best tracks, there’s an impressionistic flow of feeling in Simon’s lyrics. This is most evident in the title song, where the word “Graceland” was originally just a placeholder. It gradually became a symbolic destination for Simon as he tried to heal his broken heart after his marriage to Fisher ended. “If I lean too much toward the head, I risk being obscure or pretentious,” Simon said in 1986. “If I lean too much toward the heart, I risk being sentimental. I dread both. I dance in the gray area. That’s the thrill. When it’s right, I can feel it.”
Many revisions and additions happened back in the United States, including the guitar-synth textures from Adrian Belew and Steve Gadd’s reverb-heavy drums on “All Around the World.” For another set of sessions, including the one where they re-recorded “You Can Call Me Al,” Simon flew Phiri, Bakithi Kumalo—whose restless fretless bass is now closely tied to the Graceland album—and drummer Isaac Mtshali to New York, where Simon also shared his progress with them.He worked with David Byrne, Cyndi Lauper, and Philip Glass. He’d play a tape of an instrumental track, lean close to their ears, and sing the melodies or lyrics he’d written. Kahn says, “The fact that Paul was open to sharing the process with so many people shows real strength, and a willingness to admit, ‘I could be wrong,’ or ‘I could do better.'”
Graceland’s impact as a genre-blending, cross-cultural album has reached far and wide, inspiring artists like Vampire Weekend and Lorde, and even a viral parody of Simon’s style. But criticism has followed the album almost from the start: two decades before he’d produce for Beyoncé and Eminem, a young Mark Batson challenged Simon at a Howard University Q&A, asking how he could justify “taking over this music,” and pointing out how Black art has been “stolen” by white artists again and again. It’s a credit to Graceland’s uplifting melodies and joyful rhythms that it hasn’t been dismissed as an embarrassing relic, and that these debates still matter. Kahn says, “All these questions about appropriation, systemic racism, and the entitled versus the non-entitled—they’re never going away. What Graceland did was give us a way to talk about it.”
It’s hard to believe now that Graceland wasn’t an instant hit when it hit stores in late August 1986. It found its audience thanks to glowing reviews, performances on Saturday Night Live, and eventually Grammy wins. (It debuted at No. 94 on the Billboard 200 in September 1986, then climbed to No. 3 the following April, just over a month after the Grammys.) The last piece came from pop radio programmers, who were puzzled by the album’s stylistic shifts. The spring after its release, radio stations latched onto the lead single, “You Can Call Me Al,” with its search for salvation in the “angels in the architectures.” It was a classic case of better late than never: “It was a damn unicorn,” Kahn says. “In the zoo of music, they had no idea which cage to put it in.”
Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland by Ashley Kahn is out now.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about the groundbreaking and controversial impact of Paul Simons Graceland album often referred to as a damn unicorn in the music industry for its improbable success and contentious legacy
Beginner Questions
1 What exactly is the damn unicorn quote about Graceland
It refers to the idea that the album was a onceinalifetime impossible event A unicorn is something mythical and rare In music Graceland is seen as a unicorn because it was a massive commercial and critical success that also broke every ruleit was a world music fusion album that ignored genre boundaries featured unknown South African musicians and was recorded against political advice Nobody thought it could work but it did spectacularly
2 Why was Graceland so controversial
The main controversy was the cultural boycott of South Africa In the 1980s the world imposed sanctions on South Africa to fight apartheid Paul Simon ignored this boycott by recording in Johannesburg and collaborating with Black South African musicians Critics accused him of breaking the boycott and cultural imperialismtaking African music and profiting from it while the artists were still oppressed
3 What does groundbreaking mean in this context
It means the album completely changed the musical landscape It introduced the sounds of mbaqanga accordion and bass lines to a massive Western audience It proved that music from outside the US and UK could be a global hit paving the way for later global pop fusions
4 Who is the Ladysmith Black Mambazo I keep hearing about
They are a male choral group from South Africa led by Joseph Shabalala Their vocal harmonies are the most famous sound on Graceland Simon featured them heavily on the album and their collaboration turned them into international stars winning a Grammy for their own album shortly after
5 What is the most famous song on the album
The title track Graceland is the most iconic Its a driving rhythmic song about a road trip to Elvis Presleys mansion Other hits include You Can Call Me Al and Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
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