Ashley Kahn, "Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland" (Atria Books, 2026)
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What is the new book by Ashley Kahn about and why does it matter?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Bradley Morgan and I am joined today by my guest, Ashley Kahn. Ashley is a Grammy Award-winning music historian, producer, as well as the author of several books including Kind of Blue, The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, and The House That Train Built, The Story of Impulse Records. Their latest book is Days of Miracle and Wonder, Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumph of Graceland, and is published by Atria Books. Ashley, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for having me, Bradley.
First of all, can you share with us what your book is about?
Sure. The book, uh the elevator pitch, if you will, of the book is pretty much, you know, a focus on Paul Simon's Magnum Opus, uh, what he calls his career best Graceland. Uh the a recording that was very important to the year nineteen eighty-six and it serves as an incredible window on the culture and the politics of that time. But I dive into it from a bunch of different angles, uh, including how it was made, the music, the lyrics, um, and of course the the zeitgeist, everything that was going on around that time. So
I really appreciate that. So I I let's get to the beginning because your book opens with you writing that the story of Graceland's origins is the story of a cassette that found its way to Paul Simon. What was on that tape and what was going on in Simon's life at that time for that tape to be so inspiring for him?
Well, um, you know, that that really is the first uh chapter right there, cassettes I call it. Um and uh you know, I'm trying to both uh uh go into the details of the story, but also set the stage. And uh in the nineteen eighties, you know, that was the medium with which music was uh shared, which were uh it and how it was conveyed and it was um it gave um listeners a sort of handle on music that hadn't really been there before as far as being able to create your own mixtapes now we call it a set uh playlist you know on in streaming but back then it was the first kind of you could manipulate um uh the music and and have it And so it was this bootleg cassette um that Paul Simon had in his car. And he had been introduced to African music before.
So he was aware and of of the you know, the appeal and the charm had already been kind of cast. But here here he was inventing lyrics all of a sudden and finding that his, you know, um uh um whole, you know, uh approach to finding words. I mean it's very hip hop in in in the way of having a beat primarily to work on, as opposed to um uh what Paul's approach had been to songwriting before that, which was words and chords on a guitar or whatever, and then adding the rhythm underneath it. Now he's starting with the rhythm. So his whole way of approaching music is shifting and um where he was at his uh in his career and in his personal life was very much at a lull. I mean, I don't want to make too much of it emotionally because the guy's a resilient cat.
You know, he's he comes up from the streets of Queens, uh, and and New Jersey later. Uh, but Paul, you know, uh his second marriage was on the Skids. And um uh his last album, Hearts and Bones, had not done so well, not by his standards, not by the standards of a you know, uh a star of his magnitude. And so um the the way he looked at it was that he had this kind of freedom of not having anyone looking over his shoulder. So um as he launched himself into the idea first, you know, the idea comes first of actually working with this music, but working with the musicians that he's hearing on this cassette. He's not gonna try and recreate that music in a New York studio. He says, I want to work with these specific musicians.
And from the very first conversation he has with this record company and with others, that's the um That's what he wants to do.
So between the music that he heard on this cassette and the South African music that he knew already, he eventually wanted to go to South Africa to record his next album with South African musicians and he needed the support of his label Warner Brothers to send him there.
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