Paul Simon to stop making music after tour ends

5 May 2016

Paul Simon is going to stop making music when he finishes his next tour.

Paul Simon

The 74-year musician is releasing his new album 'Stranger to Stranger' next month but once he has played his concerts in support of the record he is going to resist his song writing impulses for the first time in his life since he was a teenager and see what his brain turns to instead.

Speaking in an interview with website Drowned in Sound, he said: "For the next stage of my life I want to see if I can find something else, something that is really as satisfying as music is to me. And I don't mean like writing a memoir or some, like, adjacent art form, I mean stop, and see - what does your mind think about the universe?

"Whenever the impulse for creativity is strong, I channel it towards music. That's just a habit - or maybe it's more than a habit: maybe that's the way it's supposed to be for my personality. I'm just curious to know if there's another possibility. But I don't know the answer."

Paul has been a recording artist since the 60s when he was one half of 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' duo Simon & Garfunkel with Art Garfunkel and he is excited to see what happens when he denies himself his musical impulses.

He added: "From an early age I was interested in baseball, music and girls, and that's pretty much the way it's stayed. Maybe now I'd say also 'the brain' - neurology - or a little bit of politics, but essentially not. But the interesting question to me is not what would I have been, but what could I possibly be if I denied my habitual creative impulse towards music."

Although he has continued to write, record and release music throughout his life, Paul thinks his ability to write hit songs is not what it was in the past.

He said: "I don't feel I'm at the peak of my ability to write hits, I mean, that happened a while ago, when it was just effortless.

"I was just writing songs, and a bunch of them turned into hits but, if I wrote 'Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover', it wasn't as if I thought, 'This is going to be a hit.' I just wrote the song. I didn't even think that 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' was a hit. I thought 'Cecelia' was a hit ... I'm not thinking about hits now, it doesn't feel like it's age appropriate at this point to worry about it, it's just not what I'm thinking about."