The lines about being a tailor arose from an occasion when Simon was wondering what his occupation would be had he been born a century earlier. "During some hashish reverie I was thinking to myself, 'I'm really in a weird position. I earn my living by writing songs and singing songs. It's only today that this could happen,'" he explained. He settled on the idea that he may have been a tailor, and likely from Vienna or Hungary, as that is where his ancestors migrated from. Simon's father revealed to him later that, coincidentally, his grandfather was a tailor also named Paul from Vienna.
