What is Paul Simon's song "Hurricane Eye" about?

Thanks for the Q and the link. Paul Simon never fails to delight and enthrall. I hadn’t heard this one before, or a lot of his new stuff, from the looks of it. I know where I’ll be on Grooveshark tonight.

I think he’s just talking “to writers” in general.

@CWOTUS I’ve been driving my ex’s car since he is out of the country, and he has Paul Simons greatest hits in the CD player. All the songs are good of course, but this one I was unfamiliar with. I kept listening to it the past few weeks and when I finally looked it up I was totally SHOCKED to find out it’s recent. I generally expect amazing artists like him to not be able to compete with the stuff from their younger days, but I was wrong with Paul! Go figure. He is incredible.

Nice. The percussion is incredible. But the words are…, are…, well…, they are typical Paul Simon. Maybe it is just me but all his words seem like a string of nonsense.
“Me and Julio down by the school yard.”
“Mr Beer belly beer belly get these mutts away from me”
“Diamonds on the soles of her shoes”
“Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard Bonedigger Bonedigger”

Some day I would like to know if it’s just me or are his lyrics really like the emperor’s new clothes.

@LuckyGuy

Oh, come on! You’re smarter than that!

“Diamonds on the soles of her shoes” is easy. It follows the rest of the lyric:
She’s a rich girl
She don’t try to hide it
Diamonds on the soles of her shoes

She has money to burn, so she has “diamonds on the soles of her shoes”.

“Cartoon in a cartoon graveyard” is a metaphor, I think, for “uselessness”. And the “bonedigger, bonedigger” chorus (sung in the background on that song) suggests proximity to that locale.

“Beerbelly” continues the lament about the middle-aged guy who’s “soft in the middle”. I don’t get the part about “get these mutts away from me” except that earlier in the song he mentioned “dogs in the moonlight”, so he’s continuing that image, for whatever it means. Maybe “dogs in the moonlight” is a romantic image of some kind, but “mutts all around me”, not so much?

I like a lot of e.e. cummings’ poetry, too, but its meaning is also not handed out on a silver platter. Even when “I don’t get it” I usually like it for the feelings it evokes, even if I don’t understand it on a conscious level. So much modern music, poetry and other verbalization turns me off the more that I do understand it.

Oh, nice song. That middle verse…it sounds like something about Native Americans… shadow of a horse, faces painted black… Black Crow, voices under the deep green sea, (the deep green sea is the grassy plains where the native americans are buried?) Crucifix (the weapon of the clueless missionaries) Arrow (well, the weapon of the Native Americans). When speech becomes a crime (they were forbidden to speak their own languages)?? I’m just guessing.

The eye of a hurricane is that eerie time right in the middle of the worst of the storm where the sun comes out and the wind stops blowing, but then the eye passes and the storm continues as bad as ever. So, while you may think the storm was over, it wasn’t. It was just the eye of the hurricane passing.

@CWOTUS Oooo… I like talking to you. Some of that makes sense.
So riddle me this:
The mama pajama rolled out of bed… What the?

I might have to listen more closely. Or maybe my eyes just can’t see the very fine magical gold threads.

It’s Mama Cajama (according to the lyrics site I looked at earlier today), capitalized that way as a name. I hadn’t known that myself until earlier today.

@cazzie I like that analysis of the middle verse! Never woulda thought of that, but you could totally be right. Who knows! Can we get Paul on the line here?!

@CWOTUS I rest my case. I just looked on Wiki “In a July 20, 1972 interview for Rolling Stone, Jon Landau asked: “What is it that the mama saw? The whole world wants to know.” Simon replied “I have no idea what it is… Something sexual is what I imagine, but when I say ‘something’, I never bothered to figure out what it was.”
Still catchy. And the percussion in Hurricane is great.