This isn't true of Rhymin' Simon. Like its predecessor, it is a fully realized work of art, of genius in fact, but one that is also endlessly listenable on every level. Simon has never sounded so assured vocally. He demonstrates in several places pyrotechnical skills that approach Harry Nilsson's (in embellishment of ballad phrases) and John Lennon's (in letting it all hang out), though for the most part, Simon's deliveries are straight—restrained and supple, bowing as they should to the material, which is of the very highest order.

Rhymin' Simon shows, once and for all, that Simon is now the consummate master of the contemporary narrative song—one of a very few practicing singer/songwriters able to impart wisdom as much by implication as by direct statement. Here, even more than in the first album, Simon successfully communicates the deepest kinds of love without ever becoming rhetorical or overly sentimental. The chief factor in his remarkable growth since Simon and Garfunkel days has been the development of a gently wry humor that is objective, even fatalistic, though never bitter.

Thematically, Rhymin' Simon represents a sweeping outward gesture from the introspection of the first album. Simon has triumphantly relocated his sensibility in the general scheme of things: as a musician, as a poet of the American tragedy, and most importantly as a family man. Rhymin' Simon celebrates, above all, familial bonds, which are seen as an antidote, perhaps the only antidote, to psychic disintegration in a terminally diseased society. As an expression of one man's credo, therefore, it is a profoundly affirmative album.

The chief new musical element Simon has chosen to work with—one he has hitherto eschewed—is black music: R&B and gospel motifs are incorporated brilliantly both in Simon's melodic writing and in the sparkling textures of the album's ten cuts, more than half recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The opener is "Kodachrome," a streamlined poprock production that uses the image of color photography as a metaphor for imaginative vitality. The song opens with a couple of Simon's most pungent lines: "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school/It's a wonder I can think at all." Next is "Tenderness," a late-Fifties-styled doo-wop ballad in which Simon tells a friend: "You don't have to lie to me/Just give me