(Warners)
Herald rating: * * *
Review: Graham Reid
After the disastrous album/Broadway production The Capeman Simon has sensibly returned to a much more straightforward approach: the opening lines of this occasionally engaging and musically restrained collection are "somewhere in a burst of glory, sound becomes a song, I'm bound to tell a
story, that's where I belong." True.
More akin to his pre-Graceland output, You're The One offers melodies which have an unforced, natural progression (the title track, Look At That), and lyrics which tell mature and interesting narratives (Darling Lorraine is a moving story of love which goes cold, literally).
Simon's lyrics are typically punctuated by wry humour ("All my life I've been a wanderer ... not really, I mostly lived at my parent's house"), acute observations of the human condition ("nature gives us shapeless shapes, clouds and waves and flame, but human expectation is that love remains the same") and there's an oddly metaphorical story about a pig which eats a sheep, a crime for a which a wolf gets the blame: "The governor says forget it, it's a done deal, election, let's give that wolf a lethal injection."
Phone call from Paul, Mr Bush.
There is also Simon's typically seamless amalgam of words and music (mostly tickling guitar from Simon and Vincent Nguini from the Rhythm of the Saints album) and the closer is an emotionally cool observation about "heading to a time of solitude, of peace without illusions."
A return to a more simple, understated and considered form after Saints and The Capeman, if a little too translucent and lacking the bite we have come to expect.
