1983 · Behind the Songs
Paul Simon named a ballad after a Magritte photograph — then hired a real doo-wop group to sing it.
The strangest title in Paul Simon’s catalog has the most charming origin. “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War” — the eighth track on 1983’s Hearts and Bones — takes its name from a photograph by Lothar Wolleh showing the Belgian surrealist René Magritte and his wife Georgette with their dog. Simon saw the picture and heard a song in it: a meditation on art, fame, and the ordinary love that outlasts both.
The lyric pays tribute to the doo-wop groups of the 1950s — the Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles, the Five Satins — and Simon went one better than name-checking them: he hired an actual group from that era, the Harptones, to sing the background vocals. Georges Delerue wrote the orchestration, with Richard Tee on Fender Rhodes and Anthony Jackson on fretless bass, giving the track its soft, after-hours glow.
A cult favorite from a commercial disappointment
Hearts and Bones, released November 4, 1983, had a tangled birth — it began as a Simon & Garfunkel reunion album before Simon erased Garfunkel’s vocals and released it as a solo record. It spent 18 weeks on the Billboard 200 but peaked at number 35, a commercial letdown by the standards of a songwriter coming off a decade of hits. The song was never a chart hit, but it earned an afterlife: Joan Logue directed a 1984 music video, executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, with Simon and Carrie Fisher playing the Magrittes — and Simon re-recorded the song for 2018’s In the Blue Light.