Though it was released to coincide with the opening of the film
One-Trick Pony, which
Paul Simon wrote and starred in, the
One-Trick Pony album is not a
soundtrack, as it is sometimes categorized, at least, not exactly. If it were, it might contain the
Paul Simon song
"Soft Parachutes" and other non-
Simon music featured in the movie. Instead, this is a studio album containing many of the movie songs, some of them in the same performances (two were cut live at
the Agora Club in Cleveland). The record is not billed as a
soundtrack, but a sleeve note reads, "The music on this Compact Disc was created for the Paul Simon Movie 'One-Trick Pony.'" Anyway, if
Simon was in fact writing songs for
Jonah, his movie character (as seems true of songs like
"Jonah," "God Bless the Absentee," and
"Long, Long Day"), he intended that character to take a somewhat less considered lyrical viewpoint than
Paul Simon generally does, but to be even more enamored of light
jazz fusion than
Paul Simon had been on his last album,
Still Crazy After All These Years. Tasty licks abound from the fretwork of
Eric Gale,
Hiram Bullock, and
Hugh McCracken, and the rhythm section of
Steve Gadd,
Tony Levin, and
Richard Tee is equally in the groove. This is the closest thing to a band album
Simon ever made, and it contains some of his most rhythmic and energetic singing. But it is also his most uneven album, simply because the songwriting, with the exception of the title song and the
ballads "How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns" and
"Nobody," is not up to his usual standard. Maybe he was too busy writing his screenplay to polish these songs to the usual gloss. (It can't have been than
Jonah wasn't supposed to be as talented as
Paul Simon. Could it?) In any case, though the album spawned a Top Ten hit in
"Late in the Evening" and may have sold more copies than the film did tickets, it remained a disappointment in both artistic and commercial terms. ~ William Ruhlmann
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