After several years of work, Paul Simon is ready to release Surprise, his first album since 2000. Simon latest effort is a collabration with U2's producer Brian Eno, the avant-garde artist best known for his musical work with Robert Fripp, Talking Heads, David Bowie and U2.
Simon insists that their working together is not as strange as it (or the resulting album) sounds.
"We're both 'sounds' people," Simon explained. "We're both about soundscapes. I thought he would bring an element that I hadn't ever encountered before, electronics, into a guitar record. Theoretically, it seemed to be a good idea. And when we actually did it, you could tell right away it was a good idea."
Simon was a fan of Eno's eclectic work, and they met at a London dinner party. They decided to "throw it together, see what the mix of sounds were, see what we produced," Simon recalled.
The results are evident from the opening track, "How Can You Live in the Northeast?," where Simon's songwriting meets Eno's wall of sounds to almost hypnotic effect. "Outrageous" is the hilarious tale of a middle-aged man doing 900 sit-ups a day while "painting my hair the color of mud."
And there's the autobiographical "Sure Don't Feel Like Love," with its lyric about a man who remembers how "once in August 1993 I was wrong/And I could be wrong again."
"That's pretty much me," Simon confessed with a soft chuckle. "You think of it. It's hilariously arrogant."
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