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Song of the Day #506: ‘Please Please Me’ – The Beatles

I started these Beatles weekends with the first track from their first album — ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ on Please Please Me. I’ve since dedicated a week to every Beatles album (with the exception of the lame Yellow Submarine) so I’m circling back around to again focus on their debut.

The band famously recorded the whole album in just under ten hours, essentially capturing on tape the live show they’d been performing for months in the Cavern Club (that’s where they racked up those 10,000 hours of practice Malcolm Gladwell writes about in Outliers). Six of the songs were covers while the eight originals made it clear right out of the gate that Lennon and McCartney were expert songwriters.

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Song of the Day #505: ‘America’ – Simon & Garfunkel

Simon & Garfunkel released only one more album (so far), though they have reunited a number of times since 1970. That release was The Concert in Central Park, a 1981 recording of the most memorable of those reunions.

Simon had been scheduled to appear solo, playing a free concert on the Park’s Great Lawn, but word got out that Garfunkel might appear and the show turned into something much bigger, both in size and importance. More than 500,000 people filled Central Park that night, celebrating not just the reunion of a classic group but the era they represented.

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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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