SIMON CONJURES UP THE SOUNDS OF AFRICAN WILDLIFE FOR NEW ALBUM
PAUL SIMON has discovered a new way of dealing with writer’s block and it’s all thanks to the creatures of the African plains.
The music legend turned to an audio journal of a 2009 safari trip he took to Kenya with his wife Edie Brickell as he tried to complete the music for his new album So Beautiful or So What - and ended up incorporating the wildlife sounds into his music.
He tells the Los Angeles Times, "It sounded like I was sitting in a room playing, which of course is exactly what I was doing, so I took the sound of the night and I put it in the background. And then I took a wildebeest and stuck it at the end of a particular guitar note every time it occurred; I thought of it as the end of a shoelace.
"It’s not a thing you’d notice until I said, ‘There’s the wildebeest,’ but it’s through the whole song. This is the degree to which I was following this obsession with making interesting sounds." It’s not Simon’s first use of the sounds of Africa - he has been using African musicians and rhythms to pepper his music since hit album Graceland in 1986.
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