“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” by Paul Simon

"Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" was the second single from Paul Simon's second solo album, the self-titled 1972 record on Columbia, and it's a jaunty little puzzle. It opens with a mother marching off to the police over something illegal she has seen, and when Jon Landau asked Simon in a Rolling Stone interview what that was, Simon admitted he had no idea, guessed something sexual and said it made no difference to him. He dismissed the whole thing as nonsense verse he couldn't decode himself.

Listeners have read the song's priest as Daniel Berrigan, who made the cover of Time in January 1971, around when Simon was writing it, and the Corona it mentions is the Queens neighborhood near where he grew up. Simon produced and arranged, playing guitar alongside David Spinozza with Russell George on bass, and he asked Airto Moreira for an instrument that sounded like a human voice; Airto came back with a cuíca.

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