Like all the master songwriters, Paul Simon can get deep inside the head of characters with whom he might have precious little common ground. Take, for example, the guy at the heart of his 2011 song “Rewrite”.
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Simon has achieved more with his music than most people can fathom. But in “Rewrite”, he embodies someone clinging to far-flung artistic dreams he has little chance of realizing.
‘Beautiful’ Noise
Because artists no longer compete on the pop charts when they reach a certain age, it doesn’t mean that they stop doing great work. In the case of Paul Simon, his 2011 album So Beautiful Or So What might not have registered on the radars of casual fans who hadn’t checked him out since “You Can Call Me Al” put him all over radio and MTV.
Yet the album delivers every bit as much potency and profundity as his classic singer-songwriter work of the 70s and 80s. If anything, the songs are infused with even more experience and wisdom, while still possessing Simon’s ever-restless musical spirit.
As an example of his musical ingenuity, Simon was struggling to get just the right guitar sound on “Rewrite”. He turned to some recordings he had made with his family in Kenya. That low-thudding sound that appears throughout the song, accentuating the guitar, was originally made by a wildebeest.
None of that would matter much, however, if “Rewrite” didn’t contain such powerful, poignant lyrics. On the surface, the title refers to the narrator’s long-gestating movie script. As you get deeper into the song, you realize that he actually wants to revise his past in the way that one might edit a troublesome bit of dialogue.
Examining the Lyrics of “Rewrite”
“Rewrite” starts out positively enough, as our protagonist promises in the first verse that he’s going to solve the problems his script is giving him. “I’m going to turn it into cash,” he exclaims. To that point, we have no reason to believe he won’t deliver. As he tells us more, doubt creeps into the picture.
In the second verse, we find out that he spends his time working at a car wash, where he suffers the indignities of his customers’ comments. “Everybody says, ‘The old guy working at the car wash / Hasn’t got a brain cell left since Vietnam,” he exclaims. Knowing he’s a Vietnam vet makes the revelations to come more understandable.
The third verse arrives with a devastating admission. “I’ll eliminate the pages where the father has a breakdown,” Simon sings. “And he has to leave the family, though he really meant no harm.”
That’s when his script becomes a conduit for some magical thinking. “I’m gonna substitute a car chase and a race across the rooftops,” he imagines. “Where the father saves the children and he holds them in his arms.” It’s understandable now why he fixates so much on his script. He sees it as his last chance at redemption with those whom he loves.
The refrains find him snapped out of his reverie time and again by the customers, even as he asks for someone to answer his most fervent prayer. Paul Simon’s “Rewrite” resonates with anyone who wants to go back and change some major misstep in their life, despite knowing full well that no amount of liquid paper or editing software can erase the past.
Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
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