Paul Simon Hearts Bones

Hearts and Bones was a commercial disaster, the lowest-charting new studio album of Paul Simon's career. It is also his most personal collection of songs, one of his most ambitious, and one of his best. It retains a personal vision, one largely devoted to the challenges of middle-aged life, among them a renewed commitment to love; the title song was a notable testament to new romance, while "Train in the Distance" reflected on romantic discord. Elsewhere, "The Late Great Johnny Ace" was his meditation on John Lennon's murder and how it related to the mythology of pop music. Musically, Simon moved forward and backward simultaneously, taking off from the jazz fusion style of his last two albums into his old loves of doo wop and rock & roll while also incorporating current sounds with such new collaborators as dance music producer Nile Rodgers and minimalist composer Philip Glass. The result was Simon's most impressive collection in a decade and the most underrated album in his catalog.

One thing Simon & Garfunkel never did much of was tour, so a Paul Simon solo tour, following two commercially successful solo albums, was one more way for Simon to distance himself from the duo and, simultaneously, by performing songs like "The Boxer" and "Homeward Bound," to reclaim his songwriting catalog. Reflecting the musical explorations he had pursued since S & G, Simon brought along Brazilian group Urubamba and gospel group the Jessy Dixon Singers. The result wasn't perfect: nobody needed to hear "Jesus Is the Answer" (a Dixons spotlight number) on a Paul Simon album, and if it was inevitable that he would try his own version of "Bridge Over Troubled Water," it was also predestined that he wouldn't come near to matching Garfunkel's original…

Hearts and Bones was a commercial disaster, the lowest-charting new studio album of Paul Simon's career. It is also his most personal collection of songs, one of his most ambitious, and one of his best. It retains a personal vision, one largely devoted to the challenges of middle-aged life, among them a renewed commitment to love; the title song was a notable testament to new romance, while "Train in the Distance" reflected on romantic discord…

The international release The Paul Simon Anthology was a two-CD abridged version of the three-CD box set Paul Simon 1964-1993. For this version, the first two discs of the box set were condensed into a single CD, while the third disc, left untouched, was now the second disc. This accentuated one of the weaknesses of the box set, weighting the selections even more heavily toward Simon's later work. Here, his recordings originally released between 1965 and 1983 (including six Simon and Garfunkel tracks) made up the first disc, and the second disc covered only the period 1986-1993, and really 1986-90, since the only recordings released after 1990 were "Thelma," an outtake from the 1990 album The Rhythm of the Saints and three performances from the 1991 live album Paul Simon's Concert in the Park. While the abridgment seemed to have been made with an eye on the British charts, for the most part eliminating only songs that had not been hits in the U.K. (the exceptions being "America" and "Take Me to the Mardi Gras"), the album still didn't function as a full-fledged greatest hits album, lacking such British chart singles as "Homeward Bound" and "I Am a Rock" (neither of which were on Paul Simon 1964-1993, either).