The Definitive Biography of Music Legend
A publishing event about music legend Paul Simon: a candid biography written with Simon’s full participation—but without his editorial control—by acclaimed biographer and music writer Robert Hilburn.
Paul Simon: The Life is an intimate and inspiring narrative that helps us finally understand Paul Simon the person and the artist, including new and absorbing insights into his most enduring songs. Exploring his successes and failures onstage and off, the book combines the scholarship, passion, and storytelling grace of biography at its best.
“Hilburn’s telling runs at just the right pace as it brings us inside Simon’s personal life, as well as inside his music—often song by song—while illuminating Simon’s ingenious adaptations of music from all over the world.”
—Billy Collins
“Master storyteller and interviewer Robert Hilburn knows how to draw the best from an artist. The intimacy of these interviews gives Paul Simon: The Life the feel of Paul Simon’s best work, generous and witty and so rich in detail. It’ll send you back to the music with all these soul-stirring stories still in your heart.”
—Cameron Crowe
“There are two great storytellers colliding here. There’s no tougher a mind, no more tender a voice than Paul Simon, and there’s no better man than Robert Hilburn to decipher the hardwiring of this hyper-intellect.”
—Bono
“When it comes to writing songs, no one does it better than Paul Simon. Robert Hilburn’s is a wise and winning account of our most nimble, nuanced, and numinous poet-musician.”
—Paul Muldoon
“A tantalizing look into the mind and writing process of the man who is arguably the finest craftsman of the American popular song since the Gershwin brothers.”
—Linda Ronstadt
“With train-wreck moments and tender interludes alike, a book that delivers a sharply detailed Kodachrome of a brilliant musician.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Listen to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”
About the Author
Robert Hilburn was the chief pop music critic for the Los Angeles Times for more than three decades. Author of the bestselling biography Johnny Cash: The Life, which Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times selected as one of her ten favorite books of 2013, Hilburn has reported extensively on most of pop music’s giants, including Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and U2. He lives in Los Angeles.
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