PAUL SIMON’S STATE OF ‘GRACELAND’

Success hasn’t spoiled Paul Simon--nor has it made him happy.

With more than 40 million records sold and his New York Yankees in second place, you might argue that Simon should be approaching middle age gracefully--his life does not appear to be slip slidin’ away.

Yet currents of melancholia still run deep in his work, a leaning that became even more pronounced with Simon’s last solo album in 1983, a shadowy collection of songs called “Hearts and Bones.”

That was nothing new; despite the bounce and the lift of the melodies, a listen to the lyrics of songs like “Slip Slidin’ Away,” “Mother and Child Reunion” or “America” will likely leave the listener slightly chilled.

This root of sadness is all the more inexplicable since Simon is, as he said not along ago, “young and in good health and famous--I have talent, I have money. Given all these things, I want to know why I’m so unhappy.”

Some clues: Simon has passed through two marriages--his latest, to Carrie Fisher, ended in 1984 after only 11 months; “Hearts and Bones” was disappointing commercially, and his 1981 movie, “One-Trick Pony,” was a box-office failure.

“It was a very rough personal period,” Simon said, but he finally came to terms with his assessment that his work was not bad; it just wasn’t popular. “So,” he said, “I just stopped feeling bad.”

During a recent interview here, Simon talked about his new record, “Graceland” (reviewed on Page 78), and the changes, musical and otherwise, that have colored his life lately. Arriving at the Warner Bros. “media room,” he tossed a baseball cap on the cushioned chair and looked a young 43, with straight hair framing his baby face and a pink crew-neck shirt hanging loosely over his lean frame. Physically, Simon, at 5-feet-2 inches, still doesn’t give the impression that he’d be much trouble on the basketball court.

But, like some things about Simon, that impression might be deceptive; he might kill you with his jump shot.

As the cerebral songwriter of the ‘60s, Simon was the cool collegiate, the smoothie removed from the ravings of orgiastic bands like the Who and the Rolling Stones. Besides being in touch with the sound of silence, Simon was the soul of self-consciousness. Students incorporated his abundant metaphors into their theses; lovers used his lyrics in their letters.

But he was always an unwilling icon. Even when the magic of Simon & Garfunkel’s liturgical concerts propelled his songs across the charts, Simon kept himself to himself and let his songs talk.

“I’m somewhat amazed that my early work was so popular,” he said. “I thought I’d get better and better.” He hunched forward in a soft easy chair. “When you’re young, what you think and what your generation thinks is very much the same. Part of the phenomenon of getting older is that you just think your own thoughts more and more.

“I don’t feel like I’m a part of my own generation or any thing. I feel more isolated. Not in a bad sense; I don’t feel lonely. But more isolated in my thinking. I sometimes spot some other thinker that I’m compatible with, but not too often.”

Simon’s public persona since the Simon & Garfunkel days has become the antithesis of the rock star; he’ll leave his Central Park West duplex to walk in the park or do a “Saturday Night Live” or hang out with buddies Mike Nichols or Lorne Michaels. But tours are rare, and interviews more rare.

“When I think about when we were on the road, when we were rock stars, that seems like so long ago,” Simon said. “I remember how effortlessly we were in sync with the world . . . and each other. We didn’t start to have our big difficulties until considerably later.

“We never looked at each other on stage. The way we got our blend . . . it wasn’t by looking. We got our blend by really listening, and we did it so much that it was like an intuitive thing, knowing where the other person was gonna go and making very minute adjustments to keep that blend, that buzz.”

Was it a relationship he ever had with a woman?

“Yeah . . . with Carrie. A little bit. I’ve heard that parallel used before, but it’s not the same. This was about the honing of skills that we began to learn when we were 13, when our lives were all about singing and making music.

“What Artie likes in music is antithetical to what I like. It just comes down to that,” said Simon. “I haven’t really spoken to him in quite a while. I know it doesn’t matter if I haven’t spoken to him. Sooner or later we’ll speak.”

Don’t look for another reunion like the one in 1981, though; Simon has other things on his mind, South Africa among them.

The backbone of the 11 cuts on “Graceland” is the bright, up-tempo rhythms of the supporting South African musicians whom Simon enlisted to help shape the album.

“On a certain level this is really the evolution of an idea that began with ‘El Condor Pasa,’ ” Simon said. “It was then that I thought there was no reason why music from another culture couldn’t be popular music. ‘Condor’ was Peruvian--I don’t think there were any Peruvian hits before that--but I liked it.

“With ‘Mother and Child Reunion,’ I went to Jamaica to record; I realized that if I want to write in that genre, for it to really work I had to go to the place and work with the musicians. That’s what happened with the South African music.”

Simon was hooked a couple of years ago by a record called “Gumboots,” “which sounded to me like ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll, but a little bit odder.” Loaded with accordions, dense drums and electric guitars, the structures of the music came out of the streets of Soweto, where it is called “township jive.”

Simon, who has never been more than vague in song about his politics, made contacts in South Africa, but he was concerned that a trip there “would be making some kind of statement I didn’t want to be making. Simon & Garfunkel had been asked to play Sun City, and we refused.

“I called Quincy Jones, who is a friend, and said, ‘How does this sound to you? Do you think it’s all right?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I think it’s all right, just make sure everybody gets paid right and that everybody likes you.’ ”

Simon found after he arrived that a black musicians’ union had voted to work with him, in part because Simon was an international outlet for cultural exchange.

“Politics inevitably inserts itself into everything in South Africa,” he said. “And by making big political statements, you could be in a position of danger from the government on the right and the radicals on the left.”

Simon kept his opinions private and stifled any urge to inject into “Graceland” any statements that might reflect on the people who worked with him. “For one thing,” he said, “I’ve no reason to assume they’d all hold the same political opinions.”

The title cut, by the way, isn’t about Elvis, “and I hadn’t been to Graceland. I don’t know why I began to write that song, but I kept singing those lyrics. Now, I’ve reached a point in my writing where, if it won’t go away, I just accept it because I just can’t get it out of my head. Sometimes I don’t really like that. But it just won’t go away, and that’s that.”

In structure, Simon crafted most of the album in reverse order, first laying down backing tracks and then writing the melodies and lyrics.

“It’s not unheard of to write this way,” said Simon, who used the same method with “Cecilia” and “Late in the Evening.”

Simon recorded in London, Louisiana and Los Angeles (where the East L.A. band Los Lobos joined Simon to cut “All Around the World”) and then went into the studio with producer Roy Halee, using digital technology and electronics “to create a larger sound.”

Whether “Graceland” hits or misses, Simon expects he’ll move on. “I find repetition doesn’t make for better work. If you have to stretch and twist yourself up a little bit, the problem becomes more interesting to solve, and anyway, you always learn something.

“There are other forms of writing I fool around with, some poetry and a play . . . but poetry on a page has to sing just as strong as the poetry in a song, and the poetry in a song has the enormous advantage of music underneath it. In songs, I try to make the right mix of conversational speech, cliches and enriched language. On a page, the language has to be more exact, more right.

“In a song, if I have to make a choice between fitting in a really good phrase and making the melody contort to hold the phrase--or losing the phrase and keeping the melody--I’ll pick the melody. I haven’t always, but that’s my thinking now.”

For all of his musical maturation and experimentation, Simon still adheres to a basic tenet that goes all the way back to “Homeward Bound” and “Sounds of Silence”: Keep it simple.

“A song is better off being easy, always easy,” Simon said, pushing back his round eyeglasses. “And when the lines that are special come out, they have to fit. If you have a really special line and it doesn’t fit, save it, because it won’t be what people remember. It’s the ease and naturalness of songs that people love.”