So the Paul Simon Facebook page had a status update saying that Paul said “Kodachrome” was about “the distortion of reality,” and asked fans what they thought about this. I replied:

As the narrator is looking “back on all the crap [he] learned in high school,” he’s romanticizing his past experiences through the entire song. If you listen to how Paul sings it, and notice the perhaps overzealous pride in the lyrics, it’s easy to imagine that the narrator is some loser sitting at a bar talking to some younger guy about his glory days. Thing is, his glory days probably weren’t as awesome as he thinks they were, and he is probably just “some guy” now.

The chorus and the coda at the song’s end enhance this idea, like the narrator has this obsession of looking through his old photographs, probably rewriting some of his own history in his mind. And when he discusses the girls he “knew when he was single,” it points to the “mama” in the coda as not being his mother, but instead his wife, who’s probably annoyed that his husband occasionally pores over old black and white photos of girls from his past.

The distorted reality, at least to me, isn’t about anything dreamlike or surreal or whatever, but mostly about how we look at our past through the eyes of old photographs, and how sometimes as we get older begin to want to rewrite our histories with exaggerations and other inaccuracies because, quite simply, we want to be remembered. We don’t want to be remembered as nobodies, and we don’t want to remember our past as being boring, lame, and ordinary.

The cliche goes that every picture has a thousand words, and with that, it’s easy to misinterpret a photograph or just as easily rewrite the past in your mind. That’s what I think Paul was getting at.