Music legend refuses to play his biggest hit song: Here’s why

A music legend is opening up about why he won’t play his biggest hit song anymore.
Paul Simon revealed in a new interview for “CBS Mornings” that he’s suffered dramatic hearing loss over the past four years, and now has about 6% hearing in his left ear. He was afraid that he might go completely deaf and have to give up making music altogether.
“It was incredibly frustrating. I was very angry at first that this had happened,” Simon told CBS.
The 83-year-old singer-songwriter, also known for his work with Art Garfunkel as Simon & Garfunkel, said he’s made adjustments to continue performing. He uses larger speakers, placed around him when he’s playing, and has made dramatic changes to his setlists.
“I’m going through my repertoire and reducing a lot of the choices that I make to acoustic versions. It’s all much quieter. It’s not ‘You Can Call Me Al.’ That’s gone. I can’t do that one,” Simon said.
“You Can Call Me Al,” from Simon’s famous “Graceland” album, wasn’t his highest charting solo hit — it reached No. 23 in 1986 — but has endured as his most popular tune, reaching more than 645 million streams on Spotify and 133 million on YouTube. That’s more streams than his next two most popular solo songs, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” (his only song to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100) and “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” combined.
Hearing loss is typically irreversible, affecting nearly 1.5 billion people globally. Hearing aids and cochlear implants can assist, but not cure, the disability.
Simon, who’s married to fellow musician Edie Brickell, told CBS that he recently met with scientists at the Stanford Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss. SICHL’s team is studying zebrafish, which have similar inner-ear structures to humans, and are experimenting with drugs that can treat zebrafish hearing loss among other ways to prevent, repair and replace damaged inner ear tissue.
Simon is a 16-time Grammy winner and a two-time member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted as a solo artist and with Simon & Garfunkel. His catalog includes solo favorites like “Kodachrome,” “Still Crazy All These Years,” and “Slip Slidin’ Away,” plus folk-rock classics with Garfunkel like “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “The Sound of Silence,” and “Mrs. Robinson.”
Garfunkel, also 83 years old, told The Sun earlier this month that he recently reunited with Simon for the first time in years. They had lunch together, more than a decade after their last performance as Simon & Garfunkel.
“It was very, very warm and wonderful. There were tears. I was crying at a certain point because I felt I had hurt him – but there were hugs,” Garfunkel said. “I’m cherishing this two-week-old memory of having lunch with Paul Simon.”