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Choosing to make music with your stepmother, particularly when she is only six years your senior, may be a one-way ticket to the therapist’s couch for some people, but for Harper Simon and Edie Brickell it seemed natural. “We never really thought to work together; one day we just started jamming after years of knowing each other and it sounded good, so we carried on with it,” Simon says of playing with Brickell, his partner in a new project called the Heavy Circles.
Simon, 35, is the guitar-playing son of the great singer-songwriter Paul Simon. Though an accomplished musician he is still probably best known as the nine-year-old “travelling companion” immortalised in the song Graceland, Simon’s account of his marriage break-up with his first wife, Harper’s mother, Peggy.
Brickell is the rootsy, conversational singer who helped to launch a thousand jam bands with the New Bohemians and their huge 1989 hit What I Am – and Paul Simon’s third wife.
Considering they are collaborators, it was a hell of a job to get them to agree to be interviewed together – which came as a surprise because, when we do finally meet, the pair are relaxed and clearly enjoy each other’s company. Sitting in a Mexican restaurant opposite the Lincoln Centre in New York, Simon looks the spit of his dad, but with more hair, while Brickell still gazes at you with that wide-eyed, sharp-cheek-boned intensity that made her the Nineties folk-pop pin-up.
“Jamming wasn’t something we did regularly, but that was the nice thing about it actually,” Simon says. “It wasn’t really about unloading ourselves. It was about a certain group of people at a certain time making up kind of fun stoner songs.”
“Jamming is easier for me than carrying on a conversation,” Brickell says. “I would rather improvise than have a conversation, because you’re connecting but you’re not connecting through opinions; you are connecting through feelings and expressions that are shared. It’s an automatic share and respect. Whereas opinions and philosophies can greatly differ.”
The Heavy Circles project seems to have revitalised both of them. When recording started, Simon had just moved back to the States to begin work on a solo album after the demise of his London-based cabaret band Menlo Park. Brickell, meanwhile, had dropped out of sight after her 1994 solo album to bring up her three children by Paul Simon. She returned in 2003 with an album, but it was the Heavy Circles sessions that inspired her to reconvene the New Bohemians.
“When I looked around the studio it reminded me of the jam spaces that we used to rehearse in,” she says. “I was still working with them and, while Harper was busy with his own projects, we ended up recording a new album with our Circles co-producer, Bryce Goggin.”
For those used to hearing Brickell in the context of the New Bohemians’ psych-tinged folk-pop, Simon’s hipper, often lush, Laurel Canyon-inflected production is quite a change. “Harper definitely brought out a fresh new way of singing and feeling. He has a big joyful energy in his playing and I don’t,” Brickell laughs. “He actually hears what I’m doing. You know, with a jam band you’re just a garland around the tree. Harper makes you the tree and he lights it up. He’s a great producer. I’m not a good editor because every expression seems like an expression of the infinity of feelings.”
In addition to Brickell and Simon, the Heavy Circles also features the Beastie Boy collaborator Money Mark and a whole raft of Simon’s fellow progeny of musical families: Sean Lennon, Martha Wainwright, Inara George (the daughter of the late Lowell George, the leader of the influential Seventies band Little Feat) and Anna Waronker (daughter of the legendary music biz mover and shaker Lenny Waronker). Simon is even managed by the daughter of the Woodstock hero Country Joe McDonald.
“It was no band; it was a collective studio project really,” Simon says. “I just wanted to use whatever resources that were available to us – musicians who were friends of ours, the equipment at Bryce’s. It was fun.”
While Simon is reticent to talk about the shared experiences of these heirs of talent and expectation, such a gathering propmts the question of whether Brickell would want her own children to follow in their parents’ footsteps. “I want them to do a job that they won’t regret doing,” she says. “I think they’re here to express what’s in their hearts. If that’s surgery, topiary, a dental hygienist – which was my daughter’s first big ambition, she really loved the girl who cleaned her teeth – whatever makes them come home and say, ‘I love what I did today’ is what will make me happy.”
And what did Paul think of the union of his wife and son? “When Harper sent me the tapes of the first songs that he produced,” Brickell recalls, “I was playing them in the kitchen and Paul came in and said, ‘What’s this?’ I told him. He said, ‘You guys sound great. Harper produced this?’ He was beaming. He was thrilled. And when more songs came through . . . some of them he didn’t hear because people have their own schedules. . .”
Brickell winks. “It’s not like you go, ‘Please listen, check this out’. You don’t do that, you wait until things are finished and say, ‘By the way, I’ve got this going on’. But what he heard he’s crazy about.”
The Heavy Circles is released by Dynamite Child
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