PAUL SIMON: Songs of A Thinking Man

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That's a knowing bit of self-mockery you hear in the voice, making room for the accent that would brand him as a sure New York boy even if his music weren't so uptown all on its own. Simon is well aware of his penchant for self-reflection -- self-immersion sometimes -- and knows how to undercut and play against it, as anyone who's seen him larking around on his producer pal Lorne Michaels' Saturday Night Live shows over the years can instantly attest. The man who wrote Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard and You Can Call Me Al and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover knows how to have a good time with a lyric, but only Paul Simon could write a tune titled Have a Good Time that's a deliberately dippy paean to incidental ennui and spiritual indifference.

"Rhythm of the Saints doesn't have an overall theme," he suggests. "It jumps around from subject to subject within the songs, slips from verse to verse. There are a lot of personal references: family, friends, some love- affair stuff. I know what all the lines mean in direct relationship to my life."

Lots of others think they know too. It's one thing to work into the new record musically, as Simon's friend Quincy Jones does when he says, "Paul goes straight for the throat. And he's smart enough to understand the African motor, which has driven pop music for so long." But it's another to cast the lyrical runes for references to his personal turmoil, especially when he is hands-down champion of the Confessional Songwriters, Elliptical Division. Perhaps it's just another kind of standing invitation.

Even Simon, who is adamant about protecting his privacy (and thus his best material), has become a little less guarded of late. The release of Rhythm of the Saints coincides with a couple of loud flourishes from the career of his second wife, the writer and actress Carrie Fisher, with whom he is not, at the moment, on speaking terms. This doesn't stop either of them from writing about the other, however. There is a Simonized character named Rudy in her current best seller, Surrender the Pink. But her ex-husband, who has read the book, acts like a man who was let off easy and maybe got in the last, best licks as well.

"It's not really stuff I talk about casually," Simon says, measuring the words like a jeweler weighing gold. There is a Saints love song called She Moves On, in which a man falls victim to a woman's witchery and pays the price: "I fall to my knees/ Shake a rattle at the skies." But the pain, which undoes him, also releases him: Simon takes the high ground. "That song is close to my heart," he admits. "Too close to the heart. It's about men being afraid of women's anger. It felt pretty real."

Along with all those effulgent rhythms, it's the finesse of the language that lofts songs like this out of the arena of gossip and retribution into something far more formidable. "In its literary context, his writing is very important," says the poet Derek Walcott, to whom Simon dedicates a Saints song called The Coast. "Most poetry is sedate, quiet, self-concerned. His imagination is much bolder and more refreshing. He reminds me of Hart Crane."