Fever, chills, and all the frills – that’s what it took to get me to watch the two-part documentary “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” (highly recommended).

My own restless dreams were of the feverish variety, lacking any sense or plot. Watching this masterful history of a phenomenally gifted songwriter, during short moments of daytime cogency when the paracetamol had kicked in, helped give my days of shaking and sweating an odd sense of meaning.

It helped, in terms of keeping me engaged with the video, that Simon himself is struggling a bit in the film, trying to record his final album “Seven Psalms” with a suddenly reduced sense of hearing and other health challenges. I could identify. One of my many strange viral symptoms was the tripling in volume of the tinnitus that accompanies me day and night.

I am not a big Paul Simon fan, particularly. I barely followed his career after the extraordinary breakthrough of “Graceland” (1986), which I did love. A number of his earlier solo songs were staples of my pub-performing days: “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” seemed to have a magical ability to get toes tapping and new pints flowing, for example. (I supported myself at Oxford University by playing guitar and singing in pubs. More on that in a later post.)

The documentary sent me to my preferred streaming service, of course, and I began sampling my way through the post-Graceland Paul Simon catalogue. I realize now that I had missed something, all those subsequent years, as Simon continued to produce elegant music that blended genres around lyrics that often seemed to be saying something important, even if I was unclear exactly what he was trying to say. This ambiguity of meaning is, of course, precisely what makes him a true artist. It pulls you in and makes you think, makes you wonder, never letting you rest in something so banal as understanding. (Often Simon just wrote stream of consciousness, or chose words and phrases that sounded good with the music.)

As the fog of fever lifted, there were a few songs, previously unknown to me, that had taken up residence in my mind, creating an indelible presence. One of these is “René and Georgette Magritte and Their Dog after the War”. True Simon fans will know that this deceptively simple ballad first appears on the overlooked “Hearts and Bones” (1983), and then is beautifully reimagined on his moody retrospective “In the Blue Light” (2018). I liked both versions, but the second is more haunting. A fiction, the song is nonetheless based on the real surrealist painter and his wife, inspired by an old photograph. Though it was never a commercial hit, there is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to just this song.

What this song did was send me further down the rabbit hole, since it imagines that the Magrittes were secret fans of the doo-wop sound of the early 1950s, specifically the music of the Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles, and the Five Satins. Uneducated as I am in the annals of pop-music history, these were all new names for me, but the Streaming Giants make them all available now for that one low monthly fee. So now I am educated about these and other pioneering African-American singers and songwriters as well. What amazing talents! (Of course I knew a few of those groups’ respective hits, since the songs are perennials, but not who the singers and songwriters were. Shame on me for missing that all these years.)

When you are decked by a virus, it is usually a struggle to find any meaning in the experience. This time was different. “Thank you”, virus. My musical life has been significantly enriched.

Yes, I am reviving and relaunching the most recent brand name on my personal blog/newsletter, “Words and Music by Alan AtKisson”, and publishing it both here and on Substack. More to come, more often, on topics ranging from global affairs and sustainable development to writing, songwriting, culture, art, you-name-it.