“Paul Simon’s unique, and I teach his shit a lot, because that motherfucker can write,” Steve Earle said in reference to his foulmouthed songwriting classes.
“He’s like a craftsman on another level. I mean, everything is alliterated way past the fucking decimal point,” the Grammy-winning, bearded country star continued to swear. “He obviously works and works and works at it, because he learned it in the Brill Building,” he told Rock Cellar.
Continuing, “But he also genuinely had one foot in Greenwich Village too, because of the age he was, and he understood it and he listened to all those records and he learned to play guitar like that.” This studious nature made for beatnik songs with an unerring air of perfection, and for that reason, Steve Earle said Simon was in a league with pioneering geniuses like Cole Porter.
However, for inverse reasons, he thought that John Lennon was not “a genius”. There was perhaps less temperance to his artfulness, and maybe that’s evidenced by the fact that following the break-up of The Beatles, his back catalogue was much more hit and miss. But as Earle vitally adds, “I do think the Beatles collectively qualify [as musical geniuses].”
He’s not the first to say that they were more than the sum of their parts, and he won’t be the last. And when it comes to the songwriter he singled out as “on another level”, Paul Simon certainly thinks that George Harrison was a significant part of that monumental sum.
If Simon’s songwriting is noted for its refined perfection, with even Hans Zimmer saying the diminutive folk star wrote “perfect” songs, then filagreeing the threads of The Beatles beyond the decimal point into something gorgeously imperfect was Harrison’s role in the fabled Fab Four. As Keith Richards put it, “George was an artist but he was also a fucking craftsman.”
Both of those tenets came to the fore with ‘Something’, a song that Simon notes in the book Harrison is nothing short of a “masterpiece”. In his esteemed view, it epitomised Harrison’s “deceptively simple” style with secondary dominant chords subverting typical pop changes and lending the song its swooping sound that almost mimics the notion of swooning.
This mastery has ensured that Simon is far from alone in hailing the song as an absolute classic. If Simon’s style was borne out of the Brill Building, then it’s no surprise that it was also Frank Sinatra’s favourite Beatles track, and even Elvis covered it too. Elton John said it was “better than ‘Yesterday’,” crowning it one of the “best love songs ever, ever written,” and declaring it’s the song he’s been trying to match for “the last 35 years.”
But the praise you suspect Harrison would’ve valued the most is the “masterpiece” plaudit that came from his good mate Simon. There’s a humility to the way that Harrison declares love in the carefully crafted opus that reveals the character that Simon refered to as refreshingly normal in a world where egos often lead so-called luminaries to blunderbuss through blemished songs, and not fine-tune them into the stunning seamlessness that ‘Something’ effortlessly possesses.
It’s a song that waxes and wanes on descending melodic lines and chromatic tones like a leaf gliding down from a tree that stretches right up into rarefied firmament, hiding its honed musicality behind serene beauty to create the impression that it’s no more than an uncalculated declaration of love. In short, Simon knows his stuff. Just ask Steve fucking Earle.
