Still Crazy After All These Years

Anyway, uh, once again, Larry's three and three.

Okay, I don't know what the world record for being white/uncool as fuck is, but Larry sitting there listening to Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years and reading/singing along, uh, to the lyrics in the, uh, CD booklet.

Wow.

Uh, I guess that's the only thing not brown in this show.

Oh, which one?

Still Crazy After All These Years, right?

Yes.

Yes.

And Something So Right is just a lovely song.

It's a melancholic ode to self-sabotage, which is a theme I have some personal experience with, as I think many, many people do.

And that is a theme that Simon came back to occasionally, like on the song You're Kind from Still Crazy After All These Years.

And that one goes basically, you're so nice to me and this is amazing and I've never been happier in all my life, but I like to sleep with the window open and you keep the window closed.

Yeah

... and, and, but there was, he was so big that Paul Simon was accepting, uh, a Grammy Award, wasn't he, I think, for Still Crazy After All These Years, and he thanked Stevie Wonder for not putting out a record.

[laughs] Yes, absolutely.

That's how huge he was.

Ramone was not an obscure producer hired to conduct an experiment.

He had produced Paul Simon's Grammy-winning Still Crazy After All These Years and helped transform Billy Joel's career with The Stranger and 52nd Street.

Herb Alpert had suggested him because Karen needed somebody accomplished enough that she would not simply recreate Richard Carpenter with a different face.

Ramone's approach could hardly have been more different from Richard's.

It was a small alteration, but it was exactly the kind of authorship that could disappear when Karen was remembered only as the voice Richard arranged around.

Then there was Paul Simon.

Ramone encouraged Karen to record Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years, a song that allowed her to step into a more reflective, jazz-influenced sound.

Karen even asked Simon to alter one word she considered too crude for her to sing, changing the lyric before recording it.

...

Still Crazy After All These Years, you know?

Yeah.

Um, that to me, it, I was reminded of like, oh, God, like being 14, 15 and scarcely struggling, and I still can struggle.

Totally.

Um, and maybe that there is something to an artist like, like Paul Simon, where his work still is mysterious to me.

Like, you come out of the first chorus of Still Crazy After All These Years, and there's this different-

Mm-hmm