Day 260: Paul Simon - Still Crazy After All These Years

I had one of those days again where I can’t find anything I want to listen to, I started about four different albums before settling on Paul Simon having some sort of a midlife crisis. I look forward to mine, maybe I’ll get a motorcycle, possibly even a boat. Obviously not in this economy, but luckily I’ve hopefully still got a little bit to go until my midlife.

Album cover courtesy of Columbia Records

I wrote about Simon & Garfunkel on day 156, but I haven’t covered any of Paul Simon’s solo work. I listen to Graceland here and there but never really anything else, so I thought I’d go for his fourth solo album, Still Crazy After All These Years.

The album was released in 1975 after Paul Simon had divorced his first wife and gone from a married family man to a single man in his 30s, living alone in New York. The New York Times described it as containing “wry vignettes about midlife ennui”, and while it’s clearly a slightly troubled album, it approaches the issues with a bit of gallows humour, like in the biggest single of the album, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”, which coincidentally only lists nine.

This is all well and good, I’ve enjoyed listening to it, but I always thought that you’d be having your midlife crisis somewhere in your mid-40s – I just read that apparently Paul Simon was 33??? I do not have time until my midlife crisis. And in this economy, I can’t afford to have one, I can’t even afford a motorcycle. Maybe a second hand scooter in a pinch, but you can’t use that to whir around and think about your mortality. I recently saw someone say that they had a quarter life crisis when they were turning 30 and thought that’s ambitious, but arguably this is worse.

Here I thought my midlife crisis was ages away, and yet somehow it turns out that I’m in peak Paul Simon midlife crisis album age? I feel perturbed. At least now I have a soundtrack for it, if it ends up starting next week. I don’t have much else to say, it’s a good album and I enjoy his sense of humour, unfortunately now I need to do some pondering. Still Crazy is an 8.5/10.