On February 7, 1976, Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It took the top spot from the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster” and stayed there for three weeks, until Rhythm Heritage’s “Theme from S.W.A.T.” replaced it. It remains Simon’s only solo chart-topper in the US.
People who talk about the elegant writing of Paul Simon often point to this song. It is a small piece of craft: a bright, rhythmic pop hit built on rhyme and a compact two-person conversation, with no wasted words. Simon himself shrugged it off.
A morning idea and a drum machine
Simon told the story in a 1975 interview collected in Rock Lives: Profiles and Interviews. He woke one morning in his apartment on Central Park, and the song’s opening idea simply arrived. He built outward from there. It was the last song he wrote for the album, and he wrote it with a Rhythm Ace drum machine, which he thought might explain its sing-song feel. He called it
“basically a nonsense song.”
He later gave a second account of the chorus. In a 2023 interview with Howard Stern, he said it began as a way to teach his young son, Harper, how to rhyme. Each rhyme pairs a short instruction with a man’s name. The title promises fifty methods, but the song delivers only five, a gap that has become part of its charm.
Steve Gadd’s drum part
The track’s best-known hook is not a melody but a drum pattern. When Simon played the song for drummer Steve Gadd over the machine’s beat, Gadd suggested something from his Army drumming days: parade-style rudiments. Simon agreed to try it, and he arranged the track around the result.
The idea paid off. Simon later said Gadd’s part “is one of the most-sampled drum parts” in music. He called Gadd one of the premier drummers of his generation. Around the drums, the recording is relaxed and slightly funky. Simon plays acoustic guitar, Tony Levin is on bass, and John Tropea and Joe Beck play electric guitar. Phoebe Snow, Patti Austin and Valerie Simpson sing backing vocals.
What the song is about
The scene is a dialogue. A man is stuck in a painful relationship, and a woman offers to help him get out of it. She is warm and reassuring, but she is also practical. She suggests they sleep on it, and by morning he sees the situation more clearly. Simon gives no backstory for either character. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan argued that this restraint is what makes it “a dazzling little piece of storytelling,” and that it keeps the song from sounding self-pitying.
Simon wrote the song around the time his marriage to Peggy Harper ended. He has said it was not about his ex-wife. The tone is playful, closer to a wry comedy sketch than a confession.
Charts, awards and the album
The song came from Still Crazy After All These Years, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in December 1975. It is the only one of Simon’s solo albums to do so. The single was certified Gold by the RIAA. At the 1977 Grammys it was nominated for Record of the Year but lost to George Benson’s “This Masquerade.” The album had already won Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male at the 1976 ceremony.
A long afterlife
Hip-hop producers have returned to the drum part again and again. Stereogum’s list of other users includes Kool Moe Dee, DJ Quik, Common, will.i.am and Logic.
There have been covers and parodies as well. Playgroup and Shinehead recorded a version in 2001, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus sang a parody on a 2013 episode of Veep.
Simon today
Simon, now in his eighties, came back to the stage in 2025 with A Quiet Celebration Tour. It centers on his 2023 album Seven Psalms and a second set of older songs. The tour continued in 2026 across Europe, the UK and North America. In June 2026 he announced Paul Simon: The Quiet Celebration Concert, a film premiering June 26 on Disney+ and Hulu, with a companion album due October 9.