Paul Simon’s ‘American Tune’ Is Having a Resurgence in Chaotic Times

At New York’s Juilliard School of Music on Saturday, Paul Simon returned to the stage for the first time since his summer “Quiet Celebration” tour ended. While his appearance was unannounced until he walked onto the stage of the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, what wasn’t surprising was the song he helped play — one he wrote more than 50 years ago that’s having a new moment in the culture.

For the final performance of the school’s “Fall Festival,” devoted to “the great melting pot of culture” and featuring student singers and musicians, Simon joined Rhiannon Giddens for his “American Tune.” The performance started with an orchestral version of Bach’s hymnal “O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded” (which inspired part of Simon’s own melody for his song) and Simon sitting on a stool and playing guitar. Giddens sang and accompanied herself on banjo. Together, they shared the stage with dancers and a choir, lending added drama and pathos to the 1973 song.  

In 1973, Rolling Stone named “American Tune” its “Song of the Year,” and with good reason. With its stately, Johann Sebastian-nicked melody and lyrics that captured the buzzkill of life in the post-Sixties world, Simon’s quietly anguished song spoke to a generation coping with a teetering country, a gnawing sense of despair about “an age’s uncertain hour,” and the need to somehow carry on. Its lyrics and sense of disillusionment have reverberated over decades, with the song being covered by Willie Nelson, Indigo Girls, Allen Toussaint, and countless others.

But ever since Donald Trump moved into the White House the first time, “American Tune” began tapping into the national mood as much as it did when Simon wrote it in the wake of Richard Nixon’s re-election in 1972 — maybe even more so. Trey Anastasio unveiled a solo acoustic version in 2017, Dave Matthews played the song online in the early months of the pandemic, and Rufus Wainwright played it live in 2023. Early this year, “American Tune” was included in an episode of the futuristic podcast Energy Curfew Music Hour with Chris Thile and Punch Brothers. An instrumental take on the song featuring dobro player Jerry Douglas was in the set list of this summer’s Alison Krauss and Union Station tour.

Giddens is no newcomer to the song, having first played it live as part of a Recording Academy/Grammy salute to Simon in 2022 (and again with him at the Newport Folk Festival that same year). Giddens says she was aware of “American Tune” but hadn’t fully engaged with it until that moment.

“I remember looking at those words going, ‘Oh, my God — did you write this yesterday?’” she tells Rolling Stone after Saturday’s performance. “It’s this idea of everyone seeing what’s happening and also just trying to live. I freaking love that song.”

Indeed, so many lines in “American Tune” feel as if they’d been written in the last few years, not during the Watergate era: “You can’t be forever blessed,” “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered/I don’t have a friend who feels at ease” are all remarkably current, even prescient.

As with that tribute show in 2022, where Giddens also sang it (and played it on banjo) while Simon accompanied her on guitar, Saturday’s performance included two rewritten lyrics. In the original, “We come on the ship they call the Mayflower/We come on the ship that sailed the moon” was again changed to “We didn’t come here on the Mayflower/ We came on a ship in a blood red moon.”

Giddens admits that when she first digested “American Tune” three years ago, those two lines felt a little jarring, but she didn’t say anything to Simon. It was Simon, she says, who rewrote them. “I did not change those,” Giddens maintains. “He changed those. When I was going to sing it at the Grammy tribute, we had a phone call about it and he said, ‘This is what I’m thinking. What do you think?’ I said, ‘That sounds great.’ It’s really powerful and opens up the song.”

Simon was unavailable for comment on the song’s resurrection, but Giddens says she’s spoken about it with him. “He said he was just really fed up, really frustrated, when he wrote it,” she says. “That’s what I remember him telling me when we first started talking about the song. I think he’s really happy to see it have a new life with young people singing it.”

Singing “American Tune” during the previous presidency was one thing. But Giddens, probably like others resurrecting it this decade, says that lines like “when I think of the road we’re traveling on/I wonder what’s gone wrong” sting more than they ever did.

“That [lyric] has a whole other flavor from when I first did it a couple of years ago,” she says. “He’s encapsulated people who care about what’s happening in the world, but feels it’s just so overwhelming. I don’t cry when I sing, but I sang it recently, and when I got to the Statue of Liberty line [“And high up above my eyes could clearly see/The Statue of Liberty/Sailing away to sea”], I literally had to stop. And I never do that.”