{"id":1296,"date":"2024-06-20T06:59:29","date_gmt":"2024-06-20T06:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/20\/in-restless-dreams-the-music-of-paul-simon\/"},"modified":"2024-06-20T06:59:29","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T06:59:29","slug":"in-restless-dreams-the-music-of-paul-simon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/20\/in-restless-dreams-the-music-of-paul-simon\/","title":{"rendered":"In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon"},"content":{"rendered":"

At eighty-one years of age, Paul Simon is still producing the most interesting music of his career. That makes over six decades of Simon\u2019s impact on the popular music consciousness\u2014from his earlier days as an Everly Brothers-inspired double act with collaborator\/nemesis Art Garfunkel to his branching out into world music. Now, in his twilight years, he\u2019s released a nearly forty-minute-long album, all one track, called Seven Psalms<\/em>, a sermon delivered via plaintive guitar and his own soft whisper of a voice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His body of work is as huge as the man is short, so it makes sense that a documentary spanning his career would stretch well past the three-hour mark. But for fans of Simon, Alex Gibney\u2019s two-part doc \u201cIn Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon\u201d should serve as a healthy diagnostic on a pop music icon\u2014comprehensible, digestible, and chock-a-block with more than a half century of the man\u2019s stamp on pop culture. It\u2019s his \u201cEras Tour,\u201d basically.<\/p>\n

Framed largely around the recording sessions he conducted in 2021 for Seven Psalms<\/em> at his studio in Wimberly, Texas, \u201cIn Restless Dreams\u201d zips back frequently to let Simon reflect on the various moments of his career. (Suffice to say, Paul Simon has to think about his entire life before he plays.) It\u2019s in these stretches that Gibney, a veteran documentarian who normally handles more politically prescient material (\u201cEnron: The Smartest Guys in the World,\u201d \u201cTotally Under Control\u201d), breezes casually through the usual mix of interviews, narration, and archival footage of Simon\u2019s relatively uncontroversial career.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say Simon\u2019s career hasn\u2019t been a rocky one, as Gibney makes clear (though frustratingly refuses to explore deeply). A good bit of the doc\u2019s first episode\u2014which Gibney cheekily dubs \u201cVerse One\u201d\u2014details Simon\u2019s early collaborations with, then bitter feuds, with Garfunkel, a close childhood friend who becomes a bitter creative partner. Then, his solo career (and life) stumbles more than a few times, from his attempt to follow Garfunkel in front of the camera in the 1980 flop \u201cOne Trick Pony\u201d to the accusations of \u201ccultural slumming\u201d he faced around his Grammy-winning world music tracks in \u201cGraceland.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Peppered throughout these sections is the same sense of perfectionism Simon lends to his music. We watch his boyish face and weary eyes grow and change over the years; his hairline grows thinner, his blazers boxier. He and Garfunkel come right out of the gate with The Sound of Silence<\/em>, and recount the way \u201cMrs. Robinson\u201d was essentially being written as they recorded it, rushing to complete it for \u201cThe Graduate.\u201d Whether there, or in the minutes-long jam sessions we see in South Africa with some of that nation\u2019s most talented musicians or finding the right lyric for Seven Psalms<\/em>\u2014complete with handwritten text floating overhead\u2014we get a decent sense of Simon\u2019s perfectionism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Docs less enamored with their subject might eke out some more interesting tidbits about their famous feud in the \u201870s and \u201880s. (Garfunkel is only seen in voiceover and archival footage; it would have been nice to get a reunion of sorts with him.) But Gibney seems content to leave it up to a few snide remarks at awards shows and shrugged acknowledgments of bitterness. Even the way he elides the aforementioned accusations of appropriation feels defensive, and we don\u2019t get him reflecting on those controversies in the present day. In 2021, Paul Simon is all but focused on getting Seven Psalms<\/em>\u00a0done, to the point where that footage feels a little divorced from the archival stuff we\u2019re seeing.<\/p>\n

In general, the doc seems to lean into Simon\u2019s outward persona as a shy, gregarious guy\u2014and indeed, the bits of contemporary footage we see bear out a wise old songwriting legend ruminating on his own life, with wife Edie Brackell and a flood of millennial musicians and sound engineers by his side. But for a work that feels like the final punctuation mark on the man\u2019s life (he is, after all, in the middle of recording an album about whether he truly believes in God in his eighties<\/em>), it feels a bit too <\/em>curated for the unironic fan. The arrogant songwriter who had rocky relationships with Carrie Fisher and was accused of cultural appropriation in his world music era of Graceland<\/em>? We see him only in a few scenes. Gibney\u2019s approach, like Simon at his peak, is to play the hits.<\/p>\n

In so doing, even the darker parts are lacquered over with a healthy dose of Simon\u2019s output, like the teeny-bopper hit \u201cHey Schoolgirl\u201d he released with Garfunkel\u2014back when they were called \u201cTom & Jerry\u201d\u2014and extended footage of the various hit concerts he headlined. Admittedly, these are a treat for Simon (and <\/em>Garfunkel, mind you) fans, and the footage of the \u201881 reunion concert with Art and a concert in Zimbabwe are particular standouts. Those looking to groove out to the man\u2019s music will be well-supplied, especially in \u201cVerse Two,\u201d where Simon\u2019s life smooths out a bit more and he\u2019s just looking for the next thing to focus on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At eighty-one years of age, Paul Simon is still producing the most interesting music of his career. That makes over six decades of Simon\u2019s impact on the popular music consciousness\u2014from his earlier days as an Everly Brothers-inspired double act with collaborator\/nemesis Art Garfunkel to his branching out into world music. Now, in his twilight years, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43,40],"class_list":["post-1296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}