Monthly Archives: December 2009

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Song of the Day #504: ‘The Boxer’ – Simon & Garfunkel

Simon & Garfunkel saved the best for last. Their final studio album, 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water was their most accomplished yet, featuring several enduring classics and their most sophisticated production.

Despite being lifelong friends (or perhaps because of that), Simon and Garfunkel broke up a lot. In fact, they nearly ended their career as a duo before it began, separating before the release of Sounds of Silence. By the time Bridge Over Troubled Water came out, the boys had reached their breaking point and the album became a poignant swan song for the legendary act.

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Song of the Day #503: ‘Mrs. Robinson’ – Simon & Garfunkel

The first two Simon & Garfunkel songs I featured were used in The Graduate and now the third is the song most famously associated with that film. I didn’t plan it that way… I guess Mike Nichols and I just have similar taste in music.

1968’s Bookends is an odd little album. Side One is a meditation on aging, including bookending ‘Bookends’ themes, a track called ‘Old Friends’ that was tailor made for all the eventual reunion shows these guys would do and a 2-minute collage of old people talking, including one guy who rails off a laundry list of serious symptoms and then says “To this minute, I don’t think it’s an ordinary cold.” I’ve always loved that guy.

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Up in the Air

A couple of movies came to mind after I watched writer/director Jason Reitman’s wonderful Up in the Air. The first was Jerry Maguire, another funny drama about a man very comfortable in his career who faces an existential crisis. That film, like this one, features a display of movie star acting that will never get the acclaim heaped on showier method roles but is every bit as deserving.

The second film was Broadcast News, James L. Brooks’ classic about three TV journalists and their professional and romantic entanglements. It’s not so much plot or technique that invited the comparison but an overall tone of realism and respect, a sense that these are movies made by adults for adults, a Hollywood rarity.

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Monsters of Folk – Monsters of Folk

I find it a lot harder to write CD reviews than movie reviews, partly because I need to listen to an album carefully several times before I feel comfortable writing about it and things pile up. So I have a handful of 2009 albums sitting unreviewed that I hope to get to over the next couple of weeks so I can have a proper summary of my year in music.

I don’t buy a ton of albums, not compared to true music hounds. I average maybe 15-20 per year, generally the new releases of artists I like and a few attempts to broaden my horizons by picking up something new that’s receiving a lot of acclaim.

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Song of the Day #502: ‘Scarborough Fair/Canticle’ – Simon & Garfunkel

I once came up with a scientific formula to numerially rank every CD in my collection. The idea was to assign a point value (on a scale of 1-10) to each song on each album and then divide by the number of songs on the album. This would give you a mean song-score for the whole album… basic stuff.

The added wrinkle came when I tried to account for longevity. I figured it would be easy to overpraise more recent songs while a song that stood the test of time would get no boost for having done so. So I weighted the scores by adding a tenth of a point for every year since each album’s original release.

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