Paul Simon brings "Homeward Bound: The Farewell Tour" to Seattle on Fri May xviii at Central Arena. Tickets are absurdly expensive. Illustration past SOPHIE FRANZ

During Paul Simon'south career making records, the music in which he specializes has transmogrified wildly, from teen fad to global hormonal explosion to Serious Art Form to self-serious indulgence to failed revolution to nostalgia delivery device. Having been part of every stage of this evolution, and at the forefront of several of them, Simon has earned the correct to be done.

The news that his forthcoming tour will exist his terminal was inappreciably surprising. Starting time of all, he's 76 years old. That would be getting up at that place even if we weren't measuring in stone and curl years—in which 76 is both ancient and average. For contrast: Paul McCartney is eight months and five days younger; Bernie Sanders is one month and five days older. Consider, however, that Simon has been a working musician for 61 of those years, and a major star for 53 of them. Y'all can inappreciably arraign a person for getting tired.

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Second, the annunciation of Homeward Spring: The Adieu Bout comes during a phase of what might exist called "retirement vogue" among artists of a sure age. If their word is worth annihilation (Cher? The Who? I'm looking at you), 2018 will bring the concluding stage hurrah for musicians equally unalike as Elton John, Neil Diamond, Ozzy Osbourne, Joan Baez, Sonny Rollins, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Blitz, and even Slayer.

After the deaths of unretired giants like Prince and Tom Little, whose continued road piece of work exacerbated their dependence on the hurting meds that killed them, the prospect of calling it a twenty-four hours sounds less like surrender than self-preservation.

Simon has said he has every intention of standing to make music and even "doing the occasional functioning in a (hopefully) acoustically pristine hall" for charity. But the bout he's almost to get-go will marker the end of a professional person career in popular that has stretched beyond more half dozen decades.

Notwithstanding, Simon is unique among the 2018 retiree course in that he is still an creative striver. His nigh contempo album, Stranger to Stranger (2016), was vital, experimental, and perhaps above all, enjoyable. Songs like "The Werewolf," "Wristband," and "Cool Papa Bong" go out the powerful impression that music itself—the process of finding it, harnessing it, capturing it, playing information technology, sharing it, hearing it—can be an elemental source of rejuvenation, for both creative person and audition. Having long since anile out of plausibility as a popular figure, Simon enlisted unlikely collaborators to assistance him make unlikely sounds, and wound up making his best, virtually surprising piece of work in a couple of decades.

So why retire?

"Showbiz doesn't hold any interest for me," Simon told the New York Times. "I am going to see what happens if I let become. And so I'm going to encounter, who am I? Or am I just this person that was defined by what I did? And if that's gone, if you accept to make up yourself, who are you?"

Who Simon is—specially in relation to the people closest to him—has been the main subject of his songs for a long fourth dimension. That'south more or less why there are still people out there pretending non to care for his piece of work.

He has sold untold millions of records, reliably drawn rave reviews from mainstream outlets, and probably hasn't played an un-sold-out show since 1964. Just listeners who fancy themselves discerning have had a beef with Paul Simon from the very showtime. At a time when rock music aficionadodom was at its sternest, Simon's focus on the self fueled the disquisitional reaction confronting him. As if the self isn't the only truly universal business.

Bob Dylan (Simon's labelmate, rival, occasional subject, and later, tour mate) had fabricated the aspiration to "serious" verse a stylish way in popular music. The young, self-serious intellectual turtleneck was a relatively new cultural archetype born of the folk revival; Simon, forth with his childhood friend and singing partner Art Garfunkel, embraced it fully. As their star rose, haters intimated that Simon, who wrote all the songs, was a B-minus/C-plus Dylan who had tricked tens of millions of presumably guileless listeners into thinking early songs similar "The Audio of Silence" and "I Am a Stone" were good. They called him conservative and pretentious, wimpy and soft, a poetaster in bard's wearable.

In a 1967 New Yorker column, Ellen Willis captured the argument against Simon's early on music when she complained that his subjects were the generic stuff of poetry students the world over: "the soullessness of commercial social club and man'south inability to communicate. This appealed to kids who hadn't read much modern poetry just knew what it was supposed to be about, or were over impressed with their own nascentWeltschmerz, or both."

She besides wrote: "I hate nearly of his lyrics; his alienation, similar the word itself, is an onetime-fashioned sentimental liberal bore."

That same year, the critic Robert Christgau, who never missed a chance to call Simon wimpy, was just every bit dismissive: "He is the only songwriter I can imagine admitting he writes about that all-American subject, the Breach of Modern Man, in just those words."

Merely stinging critical indictments are about never as powerful an influence as selling millions of records, pleasing millions of people, and making millions of dollars.

Encouraged past the massive folk-rock success of Simon and Garfunkel, he ran full-steam toward his pretentions, wearing a cape on the embrace of the Sounds of Silence LP and cranking out self-consciously fusty lyrics in "Apr, Come up She Will," "To Emily, Wherever I May Notice Her," and his indisputable nadir, "The Dangling Conversation," which groans under lines like "and yous read your Emily Dickinson / and I, my Robert Frost / and nosotros annotation our place with bookmarkers / that measure what we've lost."

What Willis and Christgau, surely two of the shrewdest music critics of all fourth dimension, failed to explain, was how easy it was (and is) to dear these songs. Simon's masterful folk guitar figures and perfect melodies are timeless enough to cover, and even sublimate, the lofty thematic conceits of his early work.

Simon's harshest critics also failed to account for the fact that, in directly dissimilarity to the conventional expectations practical to popular musicians, his lyrics got much, much improve as he got older.

By the time of the terminal Simon and Garfunkel album, Span Over Troubled Water, his musical and verbal ambitions had come together. He knocked out swelling masterpieces like "The Boxer," "The But Living Boy in New York," and the title rail, aslope gentle giants like "And so Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" and "Song for the Asking."

When Simon and Garfunkel broke up, some causeless Simon would exist lost without the angelic voice of his babyhood friend to elevate his compositions. What happened was exactly the opposite. Freed from the constraints of writing for a vocal harmony duo—a lovely constraint, but a constraint nonetheless—he became immersed in a earth of rhythmic possibilities that made his songs more versatile, his singing more focused, and his lyrical concerns more than emotionally, intellectually, and (cartel one say) poetically complex.

As gorgeous as Garfunkel'due south harmonies were, Simon'south solo piece of work surfaced the nuanced virtues of his own singing. His gift for unforgettable melodies welcomed the gentle, conversational tone and chalky texture of his vocalisation to the fore, a audio as physically pleasing as the Rhodes electric piano that plays the intro to "Still Crazy After All These Years."

His first ii solo albums, Paul Simon and There Goes Rhymin' Simon, spill over with international influence. "Mother and Child Reunion," his first solo single (the title refers to a Chinese eating place menu detail that combines chicken and eggs), was the beginning Western hit to alloy reggae and pop. "Me and Julio Down past the Schoolyard" leaned into Latin and Due south American rhythms and sounds—not many cuícas were making their way onto pop radio at the time—that somehow melded perfectly with the jaunty strumming and playful, impossibly catchy, proto-rap vocals.

Working with the famous Muscle Shoals rhythm section, he dabbled fruitfully in gospel and funk, yielding big hits like "Kodachrome" and "Loves Me Like a Rock," and quieter, more introspective gems like "American Tune," "Something So Right," and the heartbreakingly sweet lullaby, "St. Judy's Comet."

The popular experiments sat comfortably alongside moodier, folk-based explorations of (lowercase-a) alienation, depression, and the limits of dear and friendship. These themes mirrored the shift from the utopian and revolutionary optimism of the '60s into the hedonism and despair of the '70s.

The accent on rhythm in the new material engaged the body every bit fully equally the lyrics engaged the mind, a combination that allowed the songs to connect with their real subject, the middle.

"I know you see through me, but at that place'due south no tenderness beneath your honesty," he sang on "Tenderness."

He never lost the knack for writing about love, but even at his near sanguine, Simon's optimism was always cautious. "When something goes wrong, I'g the first to admit it," he sang on "Something So Right." "The first to admit it, and the last one to know / When something goes correct, well, it'due south likely to lose me / it's apt to confuse me / 'cause information technology's such an unusual sight / Oh, I can't get used to something so correct."

And fifty-fifty a casual archetype stone radio listener knows how many flippant ways Simon tin discover to leave one'due south lover.

This trajectory—from tempered hope to coincidental surrender—isn't so profound. In a way, information technology's just a ways of giving vocalism to some of the least interesting facets of the fear-of-commitment shtick that men have been enlisting to bail on relationships for time immemorial. But it forms the emotional properties to Simon's true '70s masterpiece, "Sideslip Slidin' Away," which reconciles the smoothen funk imperatives of his solo period with the thematic concerns he had been wrangling his entire career: loneliness, low, and the consequences of freedom.

Having strained for more than than a decade to give voice to the Breach of Modern Homo, Simon had finally nailed information technology.

***

It'south hard to call up of a hit song that paints a bleaker picture of life than "Slip Sliding Abroad," or any song so catchy that you can sing along with every syllable, mirroring every vocal leap, without realizing just how melancholy the words coming out of your mouth are. The people in this vocal are desperate and defeated, but Simon'due south melody ennobles them, while his groove pulls them along. "Dolores, I alive in fear / my love for you'southward so overpowering I'grand afraid that I volition disappear." "A adept day ain't got no rain" and "a bad twenty-four hour period'southward when I prevarication in bed and call up of things that might accept been"? Jeez.

If your parents split upwardly in the mid-'70s and the third verse doesn't brand yous cry, we probably don't take anything more to discuss. Past the fourth dimension this song came out, Simon was the indisputable laureate of divorce rock.

Ten years earlier "Slip Slidin' Away," Simon wrote "Mrs. Robinson." Ten years after it came Graceland. Practise you lot see where I'm going with this? In what globe is that not a formidable career? By what yardstick is this guy not one of the all-time greats?

Past the mid-'80s, Simon was in his mid-40s, adrift, divorced over again, having made ii flops in a row (1 Trick Pony and Hearts and Bones—whose best songs would combine into ane of the best albums you e'er heard). He was drastic for inspiration. It came in the form of a cassette of music played past blackness South African musicians.

He was so entranced by the audio that he followed it to its source, where he teamed with a community of players who, despite living under 1 of the nearly oppressive governments in modern history, fabricated some of the most joyful music he had ever heard. The grooves they captured there laid the groundwork for what would become Simon's greatest commercial, critical, and maybe artistic triumph every bit a solo creative person.

That is, of course, the short version of the story of Graceland, which sold over sixteen million copies, and ignited many controversies about the unorthodox nature of its creation and authorship, also as the moral and ethical legitimacy of Simon'due south breach of the existing UN cultural boycott of South Africa under the Apartheid government, which would stop five years afterward the tape came out.

But whether or non information technology was exploitative (which I don't believe), or an act of cultural appropriation (which I retrieve is function of music's almost-sacred duty; if y'all can't hear Simon'south reverence for the mbaqanga township jive audio that Graceland delivered to the West, I can't imagine what would convince you), in the context of Simon's work, information technology was nothing short of a rebirth, equal parts photo opportunity and shot at redemption.

Despite its worldwide vibe and the political moment that gave rise to it, Graceland is very much an anthology about the self. What had changed was his disposition toward that self. Compare the resignation of "Slip Slidin' Away" to the nigh-mystical shades of Graceland'south title rails. Both songs are well-nigh unfulfilled promise, but only the latter portrays a remnant of hope that grace might be bachelor to someone who'south willing to go looking for it, in Memphis or Soweto, as the case may exist.

In short, though no less self-involved, and no less burdened by illusions, Simon now understood that he was lucky, a revelation that makes all the departure any time a beloved millionaire sings about dissatisfaction.

The album too re-awakened Simon's sense of play, i of the least appreciated elements of his phonation. Compare the third verse of "Slip Slidin' Abroad," in which the father travels a long way to explain himself to his son, only to go out again, too ashamed to wake the boy. A very different male parent has a very unlike message for his son on "That Was Your Mother": "You are the burden of my generation / I sure do beloved you, but let's get that straight."

One album later, on "The Obvious Child," he felt free enough to write the lyric that gets my vote for his all-time best rhyme: "Nosotros had a lotta fun, nosotros had a lotta money / we had a petty son, nosotros thought we'd telephone call him Sonny."

I love those lines partly because they're gloriously silly and sticky, only also because they sound like words the self-serious turtleneck of his Simon and Garfunkel days might have had the nerve to write in a notebook, only probably wouldn't take allowed himself to sing. That evolution connected up to the first single from 2016's Stranger to Stranger, "The Werewolf," one of the most sneakily astute, stop-of-an-empire songs any artist of any age has released since America really went off the rails.

Information technology's been 32 years since Graceland, and 31 more than since his first single with Garfunkel, "Hey, Schoolgirl," and Paul Simon is most to accept a richly deserved international drapery call. You're well within your rights to withhold your applause, if y'all insist. Only the sound of your silence will be drowned out by the powerful appreciation of a world that has grown upwardly and (now) grown erstwhile feeling nourished by songs that wrangle circuitous feelings of loneliness, isolation, solipsism, and disappointment into words and melodies that are probable to outlast us all.

You'll also be denying yourself one of the virtually enduring musical pleasures of the past half-century. Y'all're obviously gratuitous to go along pretending you lot don't similar Paul Simon— musical taste, like suffering, is relative. But take another listen to a few songs from his immense body of work and consider the question he posed on The Rhythm of the Saints: Why deny the obvious, child?