Worst Paul Simon Album Covers

One Trick Pony is the worst of these. The photo seems random and the font belongs on a Stephen King book or something. Maybe even a Dean R. Koontz book.

Hearts and Bones is a great cover.

Surprise is probably the true worst. Hideous. You're The One is awfully generic.

Agree that Surprise is truly appalling

Yeah. Chip Kidd, who’s really excellent as a book designer for Knopf, whiffed Surprise.

Paul Simon - B+ (simple but effective)
There Goes Rhymin - D (horrendous on every front, idea coulda worked but horrible execution)
One Trick Pony - A- (fun typography cool illustrative image, good balance)
Still Crazy - B+ (nice pic, simple again, fits the music)
Hearts and Bones - F (graphic design is my passion)

Paul Simon = WTF this is a great cover?
There Goes Rhymin Simon = Yeah it's a mess, looks like some cheapo compilation from the 90s
One Trick Pony = Bizarre, looks like a straight-to-video movie
Still Crazy After All these Years = Basic but fine
Hearts and Bones = Low quality work all round.

Going with There Goes Rhymin Simon. You're the One is also pretty poor turn of the millennium tasteful bollocks.

Paul Simon = WTF this is a great cover?

otm

only ones i'd save here are s/t and still crazy -- everything else is dud; i like the art for song book and graceland too, not really any of the other ones tho

Quite like the One Trick Pony cover

No hate for So Beautiful Or So What cover?

One Trick Pony looks like it took zero effort, possibly because they were just modeling it on the movie poster (or at least using the same photos that were picked for the poster), which itself looked like it had no imagination behind it.

Otherwise, I kind of like the covers of his early solo work. Not just the artwork but even the music has this time capsule quality to them that I like. If I came of age in the mid-'70s among the same people, I'm sure these would be among the few records I'd be hearing at home that I'd still be listening to in my adulthood.

voted for There Goes, always disliked that cover at a glance and after looking at it closely just now I outright hate it

One Trick Pony looks like an airbrushed bootleg tshirt, like it doesn’t read like a photograph somehow. I HATE IT

There Goes Rhymin Simon, also much hate but at least it’s not creepy

Anyone who hates the Paul Simon s/t cover is a cop

Surprise, So Beautiful Or So What, Stranger To Stranger, In The Blue Light and Seven Psalms are all worse covers than any of these polled options. Surprise might be the worst album cover I’ve ever seen

Genuinely like/love One Trick Pony’s cover. Fun font! Hearts And Bones just looks like the 80s, could easily be a Bryan Ferry/Lou Reed cover from the same era

I'm a little kinder towards latter day albums for any legacy artist - even if they manage to stay on major labels, it's like the art dept budget of their releases has gone down to "interns with Photoshop."

I love hate polls
They’re all terrible but one trick pony is the worst

Paul Simon
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/45/PaulSimon-Front.jpg/220px-PaulSimon-Front.jpg

There Goes Rhymin Simon
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8c/There_Goes_Rhymin%27_Simon.jpg

One Trick Pony
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9d/Onetrickpony.jpg/220px-Onetrickpony.jpg

Still Crazy After All these Years
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/81/PaulSimonStillCrazyAfterAllTheseYearsCover.jpg

Hearts and Bones
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ed/Hearts_and_Bones.jpg

These images are all memory triggers for me, not of the albums themselves but of the moment they were a part of. There Goes Rhymin' Simon reminds me of Great Songs of the Sixties and other sheet-music compilations of that era. Still Crazy reminds me of my mustached uncle when I was a kid. Hearts and Bones feels like 80s bodega security-camera New York.

Surprise, alas, will evoke none of that in anyone.

Random "Still Crazy" trivia:

The cover was shot by Edie Baskin, hand-colored in the familiar style she used as photographer for "Saturday Night Live" from 1975 to 1999.
Still Crazy and SNL both came out/premiered in Oct. 1975.
Edie Baskin dated Art Garfunkel at some point.

T/S: Baskin vs Brickell

xxp Surprise does for me thanks to "Father and Daughter" (actually a new mix of the Oscar-nominated recording previously used in The Wild Thornberrys Movie) and "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" (a signpost of when the "blue state vs red state" split in the U.S. really crystallized under the second Bush administration). Also hard to forget when I'm more of a Brian Eno fan than a Paul Simon fan - never thought they'd be working together. But I admit it's not an album I return to outside of a handful of songs.

That's good to hear! Even just reading that reminds me that I like "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" quite a bit.

Out of curiosity, has anyone seen the One Trick Pony film? I assume it’s not very good, but I do like several of those songs.

кашель

One Trick Pony is an incredible film for the following reasons:
- the B-52s
- Tiny Tim in a suit made out of comic strips
- Rip Torn as Simon's label exec, who has a great scene where he convinces Simon that he should accept...
- Lou Reed as his "commercial comeback" phoney-baloney record producer
- the scenes of Lou and Paul working together in the studio
- several p good Paul Simon performances

Oh also
- live footage of Steve Gadd at his Steve Gaddiest

-Nothing else quite screams 'Vanity Project' like the amount of pussy Paul Simon's character gets in this film

You can definitely fast forward through any of the scenes featuring Simon's wife, child or girlfriend

-Allen Garfield gives a killer performance as a Lefsetz-esque asshole 'industry legend'

"Late in the Evening" is one of my favorite Simon songs, and with a structure he brings back in "Old": a song where each verse covers a turning point in a long life.

Which makes me think of charitably about the Surprise cover art that I otherwise hate: the idea that Simon has written more about an infant's consciousness than most songwriters.

There Goes... is the worst of the polled options. Hearts and Bones would be fine except for that one little red strip that makes it look like his name is Pauli Simon. The Surprise cover looks like he accepted a design that had originally been offered to and turned down by David Byrne.

I give Rhymin’ Simon a pass because it looks deliberately old fashioned and corny. It’s not great, but it’s intentional.

Pony is just…. that font is doing a lot of work.

weirdly, i think Hearts and Bones is my favorite because it looks like it at least has the possibility of being some weirdo Scott Walker/Joni Mitchell sounding record.

Laurie Anderson vibes.

Yeah Heart and Bones is probably my favourite. It has the Adam Ant VHS sheen. Rhymin' Simonis also really nice.

Still Crazy cover is so boring, I'd flip right past it at a record store

Whenever I see Paul Simon I think for a moment the dark blue lining of his coat is hair. Lord Paul Farquaad.

Elsewhere, there's something strong about You're the One that makes it look exactly like what it it is - a tasteful, mildly adventurous 2000 album by an older singer-songwriter man. It looks like something I'd find in the CD tent at a folk festival, by someone who won a Juno Award or who gets heavy coverage in The Living Tradition. Very of its time.

Surprise is odd but the ripples of water almost make it work. Maybe if there was more of that with the baby's eyes flanked by it - like Robert Miles' Dreamland. Okay no maybe just omit the baby altogether.

So Beautiful or So What and Stranger to Stranger are two of my favourites.

i like all these except Rhymin' Simon and Still Crazy. the latter doesn't get enough hate imo - it's so boring and bland, always drags down any used bin it's in. maybe if they'd made the photo bigger or something... idk.

with Rhymin' Simon, i appreciate that they didn't just slap his photo on the cover and call it a day, like so many singer-songwriter albums. and I'm fond of Album covers (and inserts) with little illustrations based on all the song titles . but it really feels voiceless and anonymous. i wonder if they couldn't agree on something to represent the relative stylistic diversity of the songs, and arrived at scrap-book junk-sale pluralism. could've done with a "Many Sides Of..." theme!

Surprise isn't as bad as I thought at the time. Maybe it's taken on a slightly retro vaporwave sheen that is more in line with recent aesthetics than back then?

Elsewhere, there's something strong about You're the One that makes it look exactly like what it it is - a tasteful, mildly adventurous 2000 album by an older singer-songwriter man. It looks like something I'd find in the CD tent at a folk festival, by someone who won a Juno Award or who gets heavy coverage in The Living Tradition. Very of its time.

I kind of respect how the artwork owns what the album's like. I kind of imagine some overeager art director at WB proposing a much more daring design only to have Simon say, "that's great, but the music isn't that interesting. Let's try to capture that in the cover."

You're The One is the first one since Hearts and Bones to have Simon himself on the cover. Definitely feels designed to sit next to the register and the dark-chocolate graham crackers at Starbucks, or Hear Music. I do like the woven fabric as reading both "handmade" and "world music." It's probably his most underrated album.

"Darling Lorraine" is an excellent, and I like "Pigs, Sheep and Wolves" too - I'm guessing Simon thinks they're underrated because they were both included in that album of re-arrangements, In the Blue Light.

I also enjoy "Old," and I remember "Hurricane Eye" and "You're the One" getting promoted a lot at the time (on TV, etc.) - okay, not bad.

I think of the album alongside Randy Newman's Bad Love: their first post-MTV album where there really wasn't a single or catchy video, and as songwriters both were going for more complex song structures and arrangements ("Darling Lorraine" being a major example).

'capeman' has a great cover, too bad about the album

negotiations and love songs an underrated cover

Each of these covers is an indication of the extent to which Paul Simon wanted to project an aura of casual, "just a thoughtful guy in New York" image at the time of release, and what photographic and design techniques were necessary to realize that in a contemporary context. He must have really winced at the earnestness of the Paul Simon Songbook and the earlier records with Garfunkel. Of course, that "studied casualness" made its way to the music as well.

I'm voting for the non-portrait. I thought nothing could be uglier than the front cover of There Goes Rhymin Simon, then I looked at the back cover. The graph paper background makes sense to give all the objects a context, but it adds to the feeling of hasty crumminess.

One Trick Pony is an incredible film for the following reasons:

- Tony Levin as the Tony-Levinesque bassist grimacing as he hears the watered-down playback of Paul/Jonah's formerly "funky" "masterpiece"

Hearts and Bones would be fine except for that one little red strip that makes it look like his name is Pauli Simon.

That little red strip represents the last remnants of erased Art Garfunkel.

"Thoughtful NYC guy" theory ^^ totally makes sense.

One Trick Pony looks like a poster for M. Night Shyamalan's Trap had it been made in ~1983.

I want to love Hearts & Bones, but that vertical red bar makes me angry.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Young Paul rockin' a serious pompadour in the headshot on the Rhymin' cover.

More album cover polls please!

Best to Worst:

(I actually like these, even if they’re a bit boring)
Paul Simon
Still Crazy After All these Years

(These are different kinds of bad for different reasons)
One Trick Pony
Hearts and Bones
There Goes Rhymin Simon

I think Suprise and Seven Psalms are more worthy of a mention compared to the self titled and still crazy

More album cover polls please!

ILM enters Caligula-level decadence phase

off topic but i've always thought it's funny how on the bridge over troubled water cover it looks like paul simon's hair is also art garfunkel's long western-style moustache

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/41/Simon_and_Garfunkel%2C_Bridge_over_Troubled_Water_%281970%29.png

just noticing now what a bad haircut Paul has there

it's mirrored by his scarf

the photo also looks like it was taken surreptitiously from a block away using a zoom lens

That haircut got worse as the '70s wore on. (See his appearances on SNL with the original cast.) I don't think he switched it up until the '80s.

tbf he did try it with a moustache around 1975

Good move having a ballcap from You’re The One onward.

Looking a bit like Albini disguised as Paul Simon (“just try on this overcoat, Steve”):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Call_Me_Al#/media/File%3AYou_Can_Call_Me_Al.jpg

I don't think he switched it up got a toupée until the '80s

Fixed.

I remember it being a bit of a deal when showed up bald at the SNL 25 celebration.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

the best one won. pity

I think u meant to post that here:
what is the rarest opinion you actually possess?

yeah tbf i like hearts and bones just as much

Fixed.

Hah, that's right! Shame, I'd like to think there would've been a Simpsons-like moment in the '80s where Simon tells Garfunkel, "Now, Art, don't worry about a thing. I'll teach you to comb it over so no one can tell. Just like my hair."