Paul Simon: The Life Audiobook (Free)

A publishing event from music legend Paul Simon: a romantic, candid, and definitive biography written with Simon’s complete participation—but without his editorial control—by acclaimed biographer and music article writer Robert Hilburn.

For more than fifty years, Paul Simon has spoken to us in music about alienation, doubt, resilience, and empathy with techniques which have established him among the most beloved performers in American pop music history. Songs like “The Sound of Silence,” “Bridge Over Troubled about Paul Simon: THE LIFE SPAN Drinking water,” “Still Crazy After All These Years,” and “Graceland” have relocated beyond the product sales charts and into our social consciousness. But Simon is certainly a deeply personal person who offers resisted talking with us outside of his music. He has said he will not create an autobiography or memoir, and he provides refused to talk to previous biographers.

Finally, Simon offers opened up—for several hundred hours of interviews—to Robert Hilburn, whose biography of Johnny Cash was named by Michiko Kakutani of the brand new York Times as you of her ten favorite books of 2013. The effect is certainly a landmark publication that will consider its place as the defining biography of one of America’s ideal artists.

It starts in Kew Backyards Hills, Queens, where, raised with a bandleader dad and schoolteacher mother, Simon was raised using the twin passions of football and music. The last mentioned took over at age group twelve when he and schoolboy chum Art Garfunkel became infatuated with the appealing harmonies of doo-wop. Collectively, they became international icons, and then Simon went on to even greater artistic heights by himself. But beneath the surface of his storied five-decade career is usually a roller coaster of tumultuous personal and professional ups and downs. From his exceptional early success with Garfunkel with their painfully acrimonious divide; from his substantial early hits like a solo artist towards the wrenching commercial failures of One-Trick Pony and Hearts and Bones; through the historic comeback achievement of Graceland as well as the Rhythm of the Saints to the star-crossed foray into movie theater with The Capeman and a late-career creative resurgence—his is certainly a musical lifestyle unlike some other.

Within the last 3 years, Hilburn has conducted in-depth interviews with scores of Paul Simon’s friends, family, colleagues, and others—including ex-wives Carrie Fisher and Peggy Harper, who spoke for the first time—as well as penetrated the inner circle of Simon’s long-reclusive muse, Kathy Chitty. The result is certainly a deeply human being account from the difficulties and sacrifices of a life in music at the highest level. Along the way, Hilburn paperwork Simon’s seek out artistry and his continuous battle to protect that artistry against interruptions—fame, relationship, divorce, drugs, record company disturbance, rejection, and insecurity—which have derailed a lot of great pop statistics.

Paul Simon can be an romantic and inspiring narrative that assists us finally understand Paul Simon the person and the designer. “With train-wreck occasions and sensitive interludes alike, it delivers a sharply detailed Kodachrome of an excellent musician” (Kirkus Evaluations).