Hear Paul Simon’s New Version Of “One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor”
Before wrapping up his farewell tour next month, Paul Simon will release a new album called In The Blue Light, on which he revisits and reimagines tracks from throughout his discography with musicians ranging from Wynton Marsalis to Bryce Dessner. “This album consists of songs that I thought were almost right, or were odd enough to be overlooked the first time around,” Simon explained in a press release. “Re-doing arrangements, harmonic structures, and lyrics that didn’t make their meaning clear, gave me time to clarify in my own head what I wanted to say, or realize what I was thinking and make it more easily understood.”
Today, he’s sharing the project’s opening track, “One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor.” The original version of the song was a bluesy rambler on Simon’s 1973 release There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. The new recording is bluesy too, but it trades out the gospel inflection from ’73 for a more spacious jazz arrangement. It gets a lot of mileage out of Joel Weinhardt’s piano, and don’t miss Simon’s wife Edie Brickell on finger snaps. Check out both iterations of “One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor” below.
In The Blue Light is out 9/7 on Sony Legacy.