You Can Call Me Al

The title comes from a party where the composer Pierre Boulez called Simon Al and his wife Peggy Harper Betty. Jon Pareles heard a midlife crisis in it, and Simon said the third verse turns to his own trip to South Africa. He told Paul Zollo that he wrote by tossing a ball against a wall and letting his mind wander and pick up words and phrases, and he admitted that at one point in the song he did not know what he was talking about either.

It was completed at the Hit Factory in New York in April 1986. When Simon learned it was Bakithi Kumalo's birthday he gave him a bass break. Kumalo improvised a one-bar descending run and Halee reversed it for the second half, so the passage is a palindrome, which Simon later called magical and impossible to play. Rob Mounsey arranged a live horn section to double the synth part, and Halee sent the busy vocal through a different tape delay on each side to keep it clear.

Life after

Released in July 1986, it reached number four in Britain, his biggest solo hit there, and number 23 in America in 1987. He first sang it on Saturday Night Live on 10 May 1986. In November 2024 he told CBS Mornings that his hearing meant he could no longer do it. Dave Matthews and Angelique Kidjo sang it with Kumalo on fretless bass at the 2022 Grammy tribute to Simon. Simon disliked the first video, and the upload in the hypersongs web is its replacement, directed by Gary Weis, in which Chevy Chase mimes Simon's vocal while the much shorter Simon mimes the backing parts.