One-Trick Pony (Remastered)

Paul Simon's One-Trick Pony never sold as well as it might have, perhaps because it was associated with a film that few people enjoyed — although, ironically enough, it wasn't a soundtrack album, and merely included some of the songs that Simon had written for the film. (In a sense, the album suffered a fate similar to Dean Koontz's novelization of The Funhouse, which turned out to be a much better book than Tobe Hooper's film was a movie, and was selling well and getting good reviews but died once the long-delayed movie got out to kill interest in it). It is a good album, if nowhere near as imposing as the four albums that preceded it, with the usual excellent playing and one unabashed jewel ("Late In The Evening"). The July 2004 reissue boosts the clarity and shapness of the sound, as well as the volume, and gives the music a fresh punch as well as adding two songs from the movie that were never on the original LP or CD — among the latter, "Soft Parachute" rates as good as anything on the original LP and should have been there, and the slow, introspective "Spiral Highway" adds an element of quiet that was missing from the original album, and the producers have thrown on the chronologically related single "Stranded In A Limousine".