Paul Simon At Peace Winding Down His Creative Work

Paul Simon maintains he's at peace at allowing his creative life to end as he enjoys being 80. Simon talks about retirement — among many others topics — in his new audio biography, Miracle And Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon, which was co-created with Malcolm Gladwell and New York Times journalist Bruce Headlam.

Simon shed light on when he knew it was time to cool things down, recalling, “After I finished the (2016) album Stranger To Stranger, it was like, literally a click that said, 'I’m done. I think I’m done.' I said, 'I don’t think that I can do this any better than I’m doing it right now.' I think I can do it just as well, but it takes me three years typically to make these kinds of albums. And since I don’t think I can make an album any better than I’m making it now, I think I’d rather spend my three years traveling.”

Simon went on to talk about what, if anything, the future might hold for him creatively: “I think the only logical thing that I can think of to make a future work better is to shut down the process of how I make things now, which is a process that has been evolving since I’m 12. I would have thought that it would have been something that would have been upsetting: 'Whoa, you’re done.' There’s something scary about that. But I didn’t feel upset at all. I felt fine — y'know fine.”

Although he's rated as one of the most serious singer/songwriters of his generation, Paul Simon has long wished that his humor would've shined a bit more brightly in his material: “Well, I always put some jokes into my songs, but sometimes they don't. . . sometimes people don't read 'em as jokes. I think that's because most of the time people think of me as very serious, so they're not expecting a joke to come. And also, there's something about my voice that it doesn't tip off a joke. It still sounds serious. I mean, it's a quality that I wish I could have in my voice; a sense of irony or laughing.”