Having suffered more than 15 years of false starts, failures and musical disappointments, singer-songwriter Harper Simon admits he has hardly charted the ideal path to pop stardom like his father, Paul Simon.
The young Simon had always shown musical promise. At age 4 he sang with his dad on the Sesame Street children's TV show. He also attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Now, at 37, the son of one of America's best known singer-songwriters has finally released his first album.
"Obviously I don't have the ideal career arch," Simon told Reuters in a recent interview, adding, "I'm in the game now."
Critics say it was worth waiting for the younger Simon's self-titled offering, released on October 13.
American Songwriter magazine wrote, "Harper Simon's debut tantalizes right now" and called him "a real star in the making." Rolling Stone called Shooting Star, the first single from the album, "gorgeous." The magazine declared, "It was worth the wait."
Simon admits he was surprised at how long it all took.
"I didn't think this is how long it would take when I was 21 years old. I thought it would all fall into place, but it didn"t happen that way," Simon said.
Simon's setbacks began when he dropped out of Berklee after two years without graduating.
"You've got to be a pretty big loser to drop out of a music school," he said.
He did not respect the school, even though it has turned out everyone from Quincy Jones to Diana Krall: "Berklee is really like a trade school, it's how to make a living playing bar mitzvahs."
Returning to New York, Simon toiled to become a star to no avail, saying it was a decade of "Trying and failing." He worked in the mid-1990s with Don Fleming ( who produced Sonic Youth) but never secured a record deal. He moved to England to escape the pressure of living up to his heritage and joined the band Menlo Park, which never hit the big time.
"From every failed project I took away something which contributed to this album being out on the world," he said.
"Obviously I don't have the ideal career arch."
