Hearts and Bones (1983)

Hearts and Bones is the sixth solo studio album by American singer-songwriter Paul Simon. It was released in 1983 by Warner Bros. Records.

Background

The album was originally intended to be called Think Too Much, but Mo Ostin, president of Warner Bros. Records at the time, persuaded Simon to change it to Hearts and Bones. The album was written and recorded following Simon & Garfunkel's The Concert in Central Park in 1981, and the world tour of 1982–1983. Several songs intended for Think Too Much were previewed on tour, and Art Garfunkel worked on some of the songs with Simon in the studio, with an intention that the finished product would be an all-new Simon & Garfunkel studio album. The album, particularly the title song, was a reflection on Paul's relationship with actress Carrie Fisher, and Paul felt that it was too personal to be a Simon & Garfunkel album, instead deciding that it should be a solo album. This greatly annoyed Garfunkel and ensured that there would never again be another Simon & Garfunkel album. Garfunkel left the project and Simon erased all his vocals and reworked the material into a solo album.

On "Think Too Much (a)", Steve Ferrone was contacted by Nile Rodgers to attend a recording session at the Power Station to record drums. After the initial attempts at recording the song were met with silence from Simon, Rodgers experimented with various effects on his rhythm guitar, which made the instrument out of synch with the original drum track. Despite Rodgers' insistence that the effects would render it difficult to overdub a new drum track, Ferrone eventually achieved a satisfactory take.

Reception

Hearts and Bones charted for 18 weeks on the Billboard 200, peaking at No. 35, although it is considered to be a relative commercial failure compared to Simon's other recordings.

Don Shewey of Rolling Stone concluded that the album "is all about heart versus mind, thinking versus feeling, and how these dichotomies get in the way of making music or love". He went on to call the songs "subtle", but added, "the music has a certain playfulness that matches the album's cerebral self-consciousness." Billboard said that the album was "well worth the wait" and represented Simon's "best work in nearly a decade". In 1986, Robert Christgau of The Village Voice referred to the album as being "a finely wrought dead end".

In retrospective reviews, William Ruhlmann of AllMusic called Hearts and Bones Simon's "most personal collection of songs, one of his most ambitious, and one of his best". Ruhlmann praised the lyrical handling of the subject of romance and the music's blending of doo-wop and rock and roll roots with contemporary styles. David Bloom of PopMatters found the album to be "riskier, both musically and lyrically", than its predecessor, One-Trick Pony (1980), "and more engrossing for it". He observed that the album was "so tied to Simon's escalating preoccupation with physical and emotional remoteness that it's hard to imagine anyone being surprised when it failed to move a fan base waiting for the next 'Late in the Evening'".

Personnel

• Musicians
• Technical