Paul Simon on using all the notes

Interviewer: I read once that on that song [“Still Crazy After All These Years”] you took every note that you hadn’t used in the twelve-tone scale and constructed the bridge using those notes. True?

Simon: Yeah, I used to do that…It was kind of an exercise that I did, which was to try and get every note from a twelve-tone scale into the song. So what would happen is that I would cover most of the notes in the song and there would be maybe three notes that you couldn’t get into the scale of the key you were using. And those three notes were really the key to the bridge.

—Paul Simon, interviewed by Paul Zollo in Songwriters on Songwriting