When talking about deafness in music, one thinks of what happened to Beethoven, who became deaf at the age of 27. And this is precisely what endures, not at 27, but at 81, Paul Simon, the Simon of the legendary American group Simon and Garfunkel, who reveals that he has lost his hearing. He still hears a little to the right, but like Beethoven, “the hearing loss started in the left ear, for this one I lost everythinghe told the magazine Big Issue. It happened in a year, and the doctors couldn’t do anything.“
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Paul Simon has a 67-year career behind him, more than six decades filled with hits, mrs robinson To CeciliaPassing by The Sound of Silence, and he tells how this test is the most difficult of his life. “I have never had to face any glitch, I have always been in good health, and suddenly, I find myself with a full attack on what is essential to my life as a musician: to hear“, he slips.
“A frustration and a very great annoyance”
It happened while he was recording his last album, the fifteenth of his career, the one that comes out this week of May 2023, entitled Seven Psalms. And it is precisely on the occasion of his release and the promotion that goes with it that Paul Simon is obliged to tell the journalists who interview him that he does not hear. And that therefore he may not be able to do the tours that were planned.
We understand by reading these interviews that he is still fighting with himself, that he has just accepted what is happening to him. He explains that everything has become more difficult, that he is no longer sure of anything, that by singing with the headphones on, he is certain of being right, but that each time he listens what he has just recorded, he realizes that his vocal line is unstable, blurry, that it is next to it.
“My first reactionhe said to Times, it was a frustration, a very big upset, and then the anger came later, but not at first just because I thought it would all go away, I thought I was going to fix myself. ” Paul Simon had to tame his condition, and prefers to rejoice in the fact that it does not alter his imagination, his creativity, his ability to dream. Curious irony of fate since this is what he sings in his latest album , find ways to move forward, face the trials of life.