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Few of the musicians spoke English, and when Simon called, "Let's go to a D chord," he discovered "they didn't know what a D chord was. Then I realized that they had a different language and musical description for what they were doing. I decided -- fine, let them play what they want -- I will solve this problem later." After two weeks, Simon returned to his apartment on Manhattan's Central Park West with six rhythm tracks. He listened to them, chasing through "lots of culs-de-sac. I would think the melodies were in one place, and I'd find them in another." (Five of the tracks were used on the & finished album.) He got passports for his three-man Soweto rhythm section to come to New York City for some additional recording, where "the same culture shock that I had experienced in South Africa, they experienced here. One of them asked me where they had to go to register with the police."
In the album's title track, Simon sings, "Losing love/ Is like a window in your heart/ Everybody sees you're blown apart," and, he now recalls, "once that 'losing love' line came out, that was a catharsis. Everything began to flow. That's when the funny songs came out." The rhythms of the album had also expanded. Simon had gone down to Lafayette, La., for the goofy good times of That Was Your Mother and out to California, where he recorded All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints with Los Lobos, a terrific Mexican- American band of rockers. He knew his aim had to be dead true this time out. "If I miss in the direction of head, I risk being obscure or pretentious," he reflects. "If I miss in the direction of heart, I risk being sentimental. I dread both. I dance in the penumbra. That's the thrill. When it's right, I can feel it." It's right on Graceland all the way through. You can feel it.
The title song, Simon says, is not about Elvis Presley or his Memphis home but about a "state of peace." Simon's double edge is at his keenest here, using a country boy's dream mansion, which turned into a mausoleum, as an ironic counterpoint to Homeless, sung a cappella with South African Gospel Group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The rhythms washing over Graceland are infectious and inflective enough to shame rap silly, from the lovely, funky arc of Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes to the spooky snap of The Boy in the Bubble. African musicians appear on nine of the album's eleven tracks, but Simon has pulled off something much more here than a little groovy ethnomusicology. He has found a new wellspring for his own writing and a pipeline for African music, from inside a country that is effectively closed, straight into the bright center of American rock. Take his word for it. It's like a window in your heart.