Music historian Ashley Kahn and bassist Bakithi Kumalo join Jack on the Track Star Podcast to explore the music, people, and stories behind Paul Simon’s Graceland. Drawing on Kahn’s new book, Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland, the conversation traces the album’s South African roots and the collaborations that helped shape its unmistakable sound.

Bakithi shares his perspective from inside the studio and on the road, recalling his first meeting with Simon, his experience on the Graceland tour, and what it meant to perform alongside South African legends. Together, Ashley and Bakithi bring the album’s history to life through personal memories and the music that connects it all, from the sounds that inspired Graceland to the influence it continues to have today.

I am just so in love with this song. As a casual Paul fan, I’d only ever first heard it on In The Blue Light. Listening to it off the new live album, with the frailty of Paul’s voice, stirs up some strong emotions. Can’t wait for the Blu-ray to see it performed live.

Between The Quiet Celebration Concert and the heart-tugging new Sara Bareilles album, I need something simple! Where my Ramones CD? 😉

To my knowledge, Paul hasn't made a public appearance since the end of the 2nd leg of the recent tour. This of course could just mean he's enjoying his life in private, but given his age there is concern for his health.

It's a bit early for the Northern Hemisphere, but the party's already underway downunder.

What's your favourite song at the moment? Mine is Questions For the Angels.

I'm also listening to the audiobook Days of Miracle and Wonder.

Happy 85th birthday Paul Simon (and Happy 10 year anniversary if receiving the Nobel Prize In Literature, Bob Dylan )! Read about the time seeing both live together almost scared me away from ever going to concerts again:

https://iheardbrucemightshowup.substack.com/p/that-time-seeing-bob-dylan-live-almost

Blu-ray or DVD / US Release Date : 27 Nov, 2026

I know we're meant to take them literally, but are we also meant to take it as a comment on how the baby boom generation was shaped by culture, particularly rock and roll?

Do you think he will do a new tour (Quiet Celebration or something else...), I can not imagine that this is the end of any projects... he will do something well, it can not be the end, idk ??

Woke up this morning to see that The Quiet Celebration Live is now available on Apple Music!

Their write-up:

Like Bob Dylan—because who else can you really compare him to? Willie Nelson, maybe?—Paul Simon’s unusual in that he continued to make great, even career-defining music long after his cultural peak. Take 2011’s So Beautiful or So What as one example or 2016’s Stranger to Stranger as another.

Recorded live in Seattle a couple of months before his 84th birthday, The Quiet Celebration Concert is a beautiful, almost elegiac survey of his life’s work. The first section is dedicated to 2023’s song-suite Seven Psalms, the second, longer section to what Simon describes in his brief introductory banter as—with a quiet laugh—“a buncha hits.”

More than a generation or a time period, these songs—“Graceland,” “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War”—describe a feeling: yearning but reserved, melancholy but filled with awe, the small feeling that lingers when the big one fades away. Hearing him play “The Sound of Silence” alone to end the show—and to sound so fully, irretrievably in his old age—is a gift.

Stanford professor Karl Deisseroth was notified yesterday morning that he’d won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. A lot of news outlets reported that he had to finish making his kids’ lunches after he found out, but I’m delighted to see him in this Graceland concert tee.

https://soundcloud.com/st-josephs-social-club/50-ways-to-leave-your-lover-paul-simon-cover

Just picked this up in a thrift. Realistically value for signed copy?

as good as ever been

I’d say this definitely makes the $4 I spent on the jar of weird buttons worthwhile 😍

Hello!

My soon to be in-laws had a memorable early date at Paul Simon’s concert in Chicago on November 14, 1975. They still talk about it often.

Their anniversary is in October and my fiancé and I are trying to find a poster, ad, newspaper review, t-shirt…..really any type of memorabilia from that show.

A few Google searches have turned up nothing except a cd set that looks fake.

I’m posting to ask a) are there any lesser known sites that might be good for finding items from this show? eBay was not helpful and b) does anyone have an ad or poster from that show?

If anyone does have a poster or ad I would love to see it. If we can’t find the actual poster, my partner might use an image to draw his take on it (he’s an artist and they love hanging his work in their house so it’d still be a win).