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Paul Simon didn’t want to be defined by any one genre for the rest of his life.
Even though there are only so many places for someone to go with an acoustic guitar in their hands, Simon figured that the world of music meant much more than a bunch of fingerpicking tunes that everyone could sing along to. He needed a better outlet for his music, and that meant having to break away from Art Garfunkel if he was getting too trapped by what his old friend wanted to play.
It’s not like Simon and Garfunkel were ever the most intense rock and roll band in the world, but the fact that they managed to cram masterpieces within the span of a few years is why Simon should be thought of as a legend. The idea of making a record like ‘The Sound of Silence’ would have been enough for any other songwriter to have for the rest of their lives, but Simon wanted the chance to give his audience something that they hadn’t heard before whenever he made one of his records.
That probably explains why Bookends ended up sounding like two totally different albums from one side to the next, but Bridge Over Troubled Water is the sound of both sides of Simon wrestling with each other. He could have easily continued down the road of making the title track and giving the pretty tunes to Garfunkel to sing every time they performed, but he understood that his friend wasn’t going to be satisfied playing the kind of rhythmic exercises that he was doing.
He wanted to have a greater emphasis on the percussive side of things, and that wasn’t going to bode well for a band that made their living off of ballads, saying, “We would have broken up anyway because Artie thrives on big ballads and I like to write rhythm and Artie doesn’t like to sing rhythm. The thought of having to write a ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ every album is too daunting, given what happened with ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. So he went his way and sang the songs that he wanted to sing and I began doing what I like to do. It would have happened anyway because that’s who we were musically.”
Granted, it’s not like Simon was everything thinking too outside the box or anything. While I’m sure there’s probably a scant few people wondering what a Paul Simon polka album would have probably sounded like, a lot of his music was the same kind of pop music he had been doing before, only this time playing around with rhythm. Even when he was making laid-back songs right after the band broke up, ‘Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard’ had a lot more jump to it than anything else Simon and Garfunkel made.
In fact, you can really hear the kind of musician that Simon wanted to become based on the songs that Garfunkel didn’t show up for. The singer was already making movies like Catch 22, but if Simon was left to his own devices, he could get away with writing a song like ‘Baby Driver’ and now have to worry about what his friend thought. His tunes had a lot better pulse to them, and that’s all he needed.
And especially compared to Graceland, Simon and Garfunkel weren’t really equipped to make that kind of leap. The ballads that Simon had written back in the day served their purpose as some of the greatest songs of their time, but even when he did bring the tone down a little bit, a song like ‘Under African Skies’ still had a greater sense of urgency to it that you weren’t going to get out of Garfunkel’s ballads.
That’s not to say that Simon’s bandmate didn’t have some great tunes in him, either. ‘All I Know’ and ‘Bright Eyes’ are still some fantastic songs in their own right, but if we’re talking about the kinds of tunes that will be remembered centuries from now, Simon’s resume is a lot more impressive than Garfunkel trying to make everything sound perfect for the moment.
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