So Beautiful or So What by Paul Simon

So Beautiful or So What, Paul Simon's twelfth solo studio album, came out on Hear Music in April 2011 and put him back in the room with producer Phil Ramone. After the better part of two decades building songs from the rhythm up, Simon went back to writing on nothing but his acoustic guitar, then let the studio play mad scientist with the results, most of it recorded in a small cottage at his home in New Canaan, Connecticut.

It's a strange, lovely thing: guitar lines that nod to West African blues, Indian-style percussion, a sample of a 1941 sermon, night sounds from Kenya, hardly any bass and bells ringing all over the place. The songs keep circling faith and mortality, which Simon said happened without planning. Critics hailed it as his strongest work in two decades, and it became his highest US chart debut to that point, opening at No. 4 on the Billboard 200.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.