Graceland

Graceland is an album released by Paul Simon in 1986. It was a hit in the UK topping the charts at #1. It also reached #3 in the US. The album won the Album of the Year Grammy award, while the title song won the Record of the Year Grammy award, for 1986 and 1987 respectively. In 2006, the album was added to the United States National Recording Registry, along with another 24 significant recordings that year.

Coming at a time when Simon’s musical career was at something of a low ebb following the disappointing public response to Hearts and Bones, the project was originally inspired by Simon’s listening to a cassette of the Boyoyo Boys instrumental “Gumboots”, lent to him by Heidi Berg, a singer-songwriter with whom Simon was working (and who would later become an award-winning jingle singer and writer). Simon later wrote lyrics to sing over a re-recording of the song, which became the fourth track on the album.

The group Los Lobos appear on the last track, “All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints.” According to Los Lobos’s saxophone player Steve Berlin, Simon stole the song from Los Lobos, giving them no songwriting credit:

“It was not a pleasant deal for us. I mean he quite literally — and in no way do I exaggerate when I say — he stole the songs from us… We go into the studio, and he had quite literally nothing.