UNDERRATED ALBUMS: He Thinks Too Much So We Don't Have To

Paul Simon's Graceland was an enormous triumph, but not a return to form. Aside from the lopsided One-Trick Pony soundtrack in 1980, Simon had been on top of his game all along. Never more so than on Hearts and Bones. Initially, it was supposed to be a Simon and Garfunkel record, but the childhood friends had yet another falling out, and Simon scrubbed Garfunkel's existing vocals and completed it himself. When he finally released it in 1983, it was the biggest failure of his career.

All of this makes Hearts and Bones sound like a troubled album. If anything, it's Simon at his best. Forgotten in the wake of the blockbuster Graceland, it has recently been rediscovered by critics and fans. It is a masterpiece; an ambitious, complex, and thoroughly gripping middle age reverie by one of America's best songwriters.

Simon later referred to the Hearts and Bones period as the time he finally began "to understand about writing...when to use ordinary language and when to use enriched language." You can hear this poetic blend of the elevated and the conversational in the title track, now a favorite among Simon aficionados. It's the story of Paul's brief marriage to Carrie Fisher. Simon has always had a way with words, but my God, listen to this song and tell me it isn't his absolute peak as a lyricist. "The arc of a love affair," his eloquent phrase, has never been outlined with more grace or humor or profound sadness. It starts with the wedding: "The act was outrageous/The bride was contagious/She burned like a bride." The song's middle section is a dialogue between the two lovers, and Simon shows a playwright's skill in showing us, not telling us, why these two will never agree on anything. In the end, man and woman "return to their natural coasts" to recover from one other.

Hearts and Bones aches all over. "Train in the Distance" is also about a divorce, this time with children caught in the middle. But being a Paul Simon album, there's also some fussy intellectualism to go with the melodrama. "When Numbers Get Serious" equates the power of love with the certainty of mathematics. Simon is so stuck in his own head, he even wrote two-- two-- songs called "Think Too Much." Mr. Simon, it seems, has an acute sense of irony. "Think Too Much (a)" is a funky, funny look at youthful confusion. "Think Too Much (b)" is more somber, climaxing with this touching family scene: "And in the night/My father came to me/And held me to his chest/He said 'there's not much more that you can do/Go on and get some rest.'"

There's plenty of striking, lovely moments like this on Hearts and Bones. Perhaps the most effective song is "The Late Great Johnny Ace." In this musical autobiography, Paul links his childhood sadness over the death of minor rocker Johnny Ace with the much later murder of John Lennon. I wasn't alive to experience Lennon's death, but hearing Simon's take is shattering enough.

The album isn't the creamy folk-jazz of 1975's Still Crazy After All These Years, and it predates Simon's later experiments with world music and Broadway. Still, Hearts and Bones is full of little sonic surprises; some doo-wop here, a Philip Glass string arrangement there. Simon was punished on the charts for throwing so much at the wall, but most of it stuck.

TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "The Late Great Johnny Ace" by Paul Simon
AVAILABLE ON: Hearts and Bones; iTunes