Paul Simon has shared some positive news about his hearing loss in a new documentary.
Last year, the veteran singer-songwriter suffered a near-total loss of hearing in his left ear which has left him struggling to perform live. In September, he admitted he hadn’t “accepted” his hearing loss but was in the process of finding a new solution which will help him return to the stage.
He previously explained that his previous attempts to rehearse with his touring band didn’t go quite to plan.
“I haven’t figured out how to perform with the hearing loss,” he said to the outlet back in July. “I’ve tried to rehearse with the guys in my touring band, to see if I could manage it. I can’t so far.”
During the premiere for a new two-part documentary, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, Simon said that his hearing has now come back to “enough of a degree that I’m comfortably singing and playing guitar and playing a few other instruments”.
“I can hear my voice the way I want it in the context of the music. If there’s a drum or an electric guitar, it’s too loud and I can’t hear my voice. But when I first lost the hearing, I couldn’t get, it threw me off. Everything was coming from this side,” he said [via People].
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Elsewhere in the interview, the Simon and Garfunkel man revealed that he once tried to stop Frank Sinatra from covering one of his most famous songs, ‘Mrs Robinson’.
“I met him once. It was very interesting too, because he made a cover record of my song ‘Mrs Robinson’. And he changed the lyric[s],” Simon said.
“They were fantastic, but when I first heard it, it was like, ‘Man, ring a ding, ding you Mrs Robinson, Jesus loves you more,’ and this is in the sixties, and I said, ‘He can’t do that.’
“And so a guy from Warner Brothers called me up and said, ‘Please don’t do this. It’s my fault I did it. Please don’t do this to me.’ So I said, ‘Okay,’” he continued.
He did concede, however, that he grew to enjoy Sinatra’s cover.
In other Paul Simon news, the musician recently reflected on his farewell tour which he announced back in February.
“I’ve often wondered what it would feel like to reach the point where I’d consider bringing my performing career to a natural end. Now I know: it feels a little unsettling, a touch exhilarating and something of a relief,” he stated.
“I love making music, my voice is still strong, and my band is a tight, extraordinary group of gifted musicians. I think about music constantly. I am very grateful for a fulfilling career and, of course, most of all to the audiences who heard something in their music that touched their hearts.”