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May 18, 2016 7:41 PM   Subscribe

"Serotonin is the drug that puts you in the situation where you feel safe and comfortable. The drug that gives you the awe is the dopamine. And the adrenaline is the thing that keeps you going." Paul Simon’s Ambition, and Inspiration, Never Gets Old [SLNYT, Jon Pareles]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (20 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Interesting that Paul Simon uses brain chemistry to talk about different forms of music. The adrenaline of "a quick hit" (pun intended) vs a serotonin release from listening to a full album.

I'm no neurologist but I presume things aren't as simple as what Paul Simon is quoted as saying in this article.

Which is fine; An artist can create great things without necessarily having a mental model that's scientifically correct.

I'm curious about the statement "Serotonin is the drug that puts you in the situation where you feel safe and comfortable."

As someone who takes an SSRI daily, I'd love to know if this statement is generally considered to be true. My understanding is that it's a lot more complex than that.
posted by Is your name not Bruce, then? at 8:30 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Paul Simon, Jack Black and Eddie Vedder at a Mariners game.

This was in 2015. I was at the game, a few sections over, and missed seeing them.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:58 PM on May 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Ha, I've been meaning to get his "new" album for 5 years? Maybe I'll buy the pair when this one comes out. He seems to put a lot of thought into his craft & I appreciate that.
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:19 PM on May 18, 2016


Ha, I've been meaning to get his "new" album for 5 years? \

If you mean So Beautiful or So What, get it! It's got some real gems on it.

Though there are things to beef about here or there, Paul Simon is the rare artist who has constantly maintained his creativity and expression without becoming a pastiche of his former self for, what, nigh on 60 years now? I appreciate his incredible verbal and musical gifts. There are few artists who can marry sense to sound so well, nor whose phrasings resonate in my mind on an ordinary day. There's some sort of gift he has for summing up the preoccupations of 1st-world modernity in observational vignettes. He's also an inspiration for always seeking new collaborations and involvements.

It's the 21st century's curse to cast everything as neuroscience. Simon's got a point when he talks about letting an album-length composition unfold over time. It's still a good thing to do as a listener, and a good way to write as an artist. Even so I'm not sure it's a crisis. I still listen to full albums, especially when they are new, and so do young people who find a new passion. And also, breaking albums up into 3-minute singles is not an idea from the teens or oughts, but from the 40s and 50s. The best way to be sure your album is heard as an album is to write and present it as an album, across media platforms.
posted by Miko at 9:30 PM on May 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


His voice sounds pretty great for a 74-year-old.
posted by straight at 9:55 PM on May 18, 2016


Thanks for posting this; I had no idea he had a new album coming out.

Paul Simon gets a lot of crap on Metafilter but for good reason; there are a lot of solid things to call the guy out on. He's also a phenomenal musician, who has produced an ever-evolving and ever-changing catalogue of complicated, thought-provoking work, both lyrically and musically. Rhythm of the Saints tops my list, but I fall into the rabbit hole of "oh, no, there goes rhymin' simon is the best, wait, oh crap, you're the one he gets all moody and complicated, no maybe it's surprise, what a polished pop album, or, maybe...."

His musical execution is great, of course, but he sing-acts his lyrics in a way that's so expressive and fresh and real. It makes his songs hit you right where he intends. I watched an interview of his when So Beautiful or So What came out, and the interviewer asked him the meaning behind a certain song. He began to describe the lyrics, but ended up simply reciting the lyrics to her. He had this certain, unique idea for a song, so he worked, distilled, and edited to say exactly what he wanted to say in the most accurate, purest way. And so if you ask for it said in a different way.....it's just not as good as the way he already has. Simon is an incredible lyricist, and he can match his words in his delivery.

I saw him live a few years ago, which was an opportunity I never expected, and dude can still totally rock a live show.
posted by missmary6 at 10:33 PM on May 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


A while back, on my Facebook feed, some friends and I had a discussion about how good a lyricist Simon is. We arbitrarily handicapped the conversation to just the first lines of Paul Simon songs, and we were ready to canonize him as a literary genius. Tell me you wouldn't read a book with opening lines like these:

It was a slow day, the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road. There was a bright light, a shattering of shop windows. The bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.

"The problem is all inside your head" she said to me.

I'm accustomed to a smooth ride; or maybe I'm a dog who's lost his bite.

One and one-half wandering Jews....

Hello darkness, my old friend.
posted by aureliobuendia at 5:00 AM on May 19, 2016 [9 favorites]


After Prince's death, I told my husband that the only thing that would hurt this way would be when Paul Simon died. My father was a folk music junkie, so I was raised with a lot of Simon and Garfunkel in the house, but one day, as a moody teenager who was moping around the house (something had gone terribly wrong and nothing would ever be right again), he gave me a CD he had been planning to give me a few days later for my birthday. It was "Negotiations and Love Songs," and something about Paul Simon's storytelling, the way he can move from gentle melancholy to irony to observation to vast good humor about the universe clicked right in with me and has never unclicked. His stuff feels very personal, like I'm inhabiting his space for a new view on something. (Actually, that's what Prince did for me too, as I am not a fierce sex goddess but frequently felt like one with Prince.)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this album. And yes, "So Beautiful or So What" is lovely and really does have some gems of songs on there.
posted by PussKillian at 6:16 AM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Paul Simon gave me my best/worst "don't meet your heroes" story. I may have told it on here before, but when I 13 my parents took me and my siblings out to an annual Artists and Writers benefit softball game in East Hampton. Wasn't our usual type of thing, but it was a beautiful day a lot of fun.
This was back when I got at least some thrill out of meeting celebrities, and met a couple that day. Roy Scheider was a total sweetheart.
But then I saw Paul Simon and I was starstruck. I was reared on Graceland and One Trick Pony remains my favorite album to this day. I went up to him and asked him for his autograph. Now, remember I was 13 years old, although admittedly about his height. He looked me up and down and said "I think not" and walked away. I was bummed, but figured maybe he just wasn't ready yet. So five minutes later I see him signing autographs for other people (hindsight: women), and asked him again. He looked at me again and said "I don't think so".
Total. Heart. Break.
My mother then went and got his autograph for me, and I ripped it up. It wasn't about the signature, even though I briefly thought it was.
It took me years to shake that experience and get back to listening to his music, but I couldn't stay away forever.
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 6:46 AM on May 19, 2016 [8 favorites]


Strangely enough, when I was 13 I had a massive Paul Simon crush as well; fortunately I never met him.
posted by splitpeasoup at 7:38 AM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Hey, he's got a song on this new album named after a Mefite!
posted by oakroom at 7:41 AM on May 19, 2016


SUN CITY HERE WE COME!
posted by symbioid at 8:16 AM on May 19, 2016


But then I saw Paul Simon and I was starstruck. I was reared on Graceland and One Trick Pony remains my favorite album to this day. I went up to him and asked him for his autograph. Now, remember I was 13 years old, although admittedly about his height. He looked me up and down and said "I think not" and walked away. I was bummed, but figured maybe he just wasn't ready yet. So five minutes later I see him signing autographs for other people (hindsight: women), and asked him again. He looked at me again and said "I don't think so".

Would you say you resembled a young Bob Dylan?
posted by jamjam at 8:49 AM on May 19, 2016


I've always had a squinty eye towards him ever since reading that he basically stole a song from Los Lobos without crediting them.
posted by lumpenprole at 10:06 AM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


As someone who takes an SSRI daily, I'd love to know if this statement is generally considered to be true. My understanding is that it's a lot more complex than that.

Neurotransmitters are to brains what electrons are to a computer. They don't intrinsically carry any meaningful information. Instead, information is encoded in the patterns of their mobilization. Saying that depression is caused by a serotonin imbalance is like saying a computer virus is caused by an electron imbalance. It's not wrong, it's just meaningless.

Where the neurotransmitter/electron analogy breaks down is that the brain has several different neurotransmitter systems, whereas computers only use one type of electron. Furthermore, neurotransmitters tend to have functional niches. Famously, serotonin is heavily involved in mood regulation, and arguably to a degree that other neurotransmitters are not.

What's important to note, however, is that 1) no neurotransmitter is limited to a single function, and 2) no function is mediated by a single neurotransmitter. So it would be correct to say that serotonin plays an important role in regulating mood, but it would be inaccurate to call serotonin the mood chemical, and it would be extremely misleading to call it "the happy chemical".

If increasing serotonin signaling in a global, nonspecific way caused feelings of happiness, then people would start to feel happy within hours of taking an SSRI. This does not happen. Non-depressed people don't feel any happier after taking an SSRI. A small proportion of depressed people (~20-30%) do experience a reduction in their depressive symptoms, but the effect typically takes several weeks to manifest. It seems to result from the brain's adaptation to the drug, rather than the drug's immediate effects on serotonin signaling.

I’ll tell you the best conceptual framework I've come up with for describing, in simple terms, how antidepressants work. Not best in terms of accuracy or validity, but best in terms of abstractly expressing what you might call the nature of the beast. If depression is a voice in your head telling you bad things (or, conversely, a painful silence), then antidepressants are a white noise machine. They drown out serotonin signaling in nonspecific noise, which boosts overall serotonin activity without amplifying any particular signal. Remember, serotonin does not cause bad feelings or good feelings, it's just a medium in which feelings are encoded. The brain adapts to the additional noise, and the result is that overall, sound seems to be distributed more evenly throughout the room, and the more destructive voices are less capable of commanding attention. It's a simplistic and inaccurate metaphor (and for that I reason I share it somewhat reluctantly), but I consider it useful for conferring enlightenment as opposed to knowledge.
posted by dephlogisticated at 4:35 PM on May 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've always had a squinty eye towards him ever since reading that he basically stole a song from Los Lobos without crediting them.

That story, or at least the interpretation it got in the press, is pretty shaky, IMO, and I've always felt overblown. If Los Lobos were capable of writing "The Myth of Fingerprints," then nothing else in their repertoire indicates that. The story is just an allegation, and the band's never attempted to prove it in court, and it feels potentially sour-grapey to me. I just think there's much too much murky stuff in a creative interchange to say that he "stole" a song. Whatever he stole, if he stole anything, wasn't "The Myth of Fingerprints." Maybe it was a riff or a chord progression that he took back and elaborated. But you can't copyright a chord progression, and it would have had to have been a long way from what came out as the song. I think there are some nuanced discussions to be had, well, that have been had ad nauseam, about Simon's collaborations and how far he's crossed the inspiration/appropriation line. They're interesting enough, though tired. But I think they sort of pale compared to his actual skills and output, the work he's demonstrably done, and keeps on doing, depending centrally on his own creative input.

Is that to say I don't think he's an asshole? Based on many stories over the years, I think he does sound like sort of a jerk. But I'm not trying to be friends with him or work with him, so I'm not terribly troubled. I don't think artists are really under an obligation to be nice people, and he got famous so young I think he probably has never developed a good basis for relationships with fame and audiences and, well, other people.
posted by Miko at 8:54 PM on May 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


It's definitely Los Lobos playing on the album track so it got as far as them cutting basics, which is far enough along that they should have received co-writing credit, it they helped originate the idea.
posted by Devils Rancher at 2:11 AM on May 20, 2016


It's definitely Los Lobos playing on the album track

And they got a performer credit. It may be that they deserved a co-writer credit (which they now have), but I think too much has been made of it. I've talked about a bunch of times on MeFi and MeCha, so I'm not eager to circle the barn again and think it's a shame that you can't talk about any aspect of Simon now without having to talk about this. But a lot of things about the story speak more to me of mismatched expectations, poor communication, unclear negotiations, personality conflicts and differing working styles ("we don't jam, we just play songs" - ? - very odd, unusual, why would you walk into a session with that in your head), and there's not much evidence that they had a complete song that Simon 'stole' vs. a free jam or song fragment or chord progression that built up in the session. Even the story from the horse's mouth is super fishy. I suspect they got a nice settlement and to me, it's a business dispute ("where there's a hit, there's a writ") that doesn't have much to do with the artistic output. It's clearly a Paul Simon song that has a lot more in common with any Paul Simon song than with any Los Lobos song. And the whole thing drops with irony when you reflect that Los Lobos' biggest hit and best-known song is a cover.

I've softened a lot on how I view Simon's process. He's voracious an a gorilla and I do think he is bad at reading others and being generous about sharing his fame and credit. That is something there's a history of and a fair critique. But I stop short of endorsing what's become the one-line hit on Simon: He "stole" Los Lobos' song. It seems to be quite a bit more nuanced than that.
posted by Miko at 7:39 AM on May 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I don't really know what happened exactly between him & Los Lobos, & you're right- it drags conversations around here down repeatedly.

However, I think you're selling Los Lobos short as writers & artists. The title track to La Pistola y el Corazon ( the only original on the album, amusingly) is a powerful piece of work, not the mention all of Kiko & Good Morning Aztlan.

They speak in a different idiom, but it's a damn good one.
posted by Devils Rancher at 1:01 PM on May 20, 2016


I think they're a good and interesting band. I don't think they're a supergroup or that their appeal has broken through to the mainstream, apart from that one big hit.
posted by Miko at 6:44 PM on May 20, 2016


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