1986 · Behind the Songs
Graceland’s closing track was built with Los Lobos — and the collaboration ended in a public dispute over who wrote it.
Graceland closes not in South Africa but in East Los Angeles. “All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints,” the album’s final track, was recorded in Los Angeles with the members of Los Lobos: David Hidalgo on accordion, guitars, and vocals, César Rosas on guitars and vocals, Conrad Lozano on bass, Louie Pérez on drums, and Steve Berlin on saxophone, with Steve Gadd adding drums and Ralph MacDonald on percussion.
The song runs just 3:15, but its aftermath ran for years. Berlin later said Simon had built the track out of a Los Lobos jam — “it is exactly what you hear,” he said — and that the band received neither songwriting credit nor payment. Simon denied it, saying he heard nothing of their claim until six months after the album became a hit, when his manager received a lawyer’s letter. Both accounts have been on the public record ever since, and the dispute remains one of the rock era’s most quoted cautionary tales about collaboration and credit.
An ending that keeps echoing
Whatever the writing room looked like, the record itself is joyful — an accordion-driven romp that sends Graceland, the 1986 album that won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, out dancing. “All Around the World” never became a single, but as a closing statement it does something fitting: it leaves the listener with the sound of musicians in a room together, and a question about fingerprints that the title never quite answers.