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Song of the Day #1,171: ‘Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall’ – Paul Simon

I consider myself a pretty big Paul Simon fan, but I had never heard of The Paul Simon Songbook before working on these weekend posts. I’d always assumed his first solo album was released after the break-up of Simon & Garfunkel.

To be fair, Songbook wasn’t exactly a high-profile release. Simon himself killed a planned U.S. release of the album and reportedly requested that the British release be removed from circulation. Presumably he was unhappy not with the songs but with the recordings, because he went on to release almost all of the material on different albums over the next few years.

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Song of the Day #1,170: ‘The Side of a Hill’ – Paul Simon

After the failure of Simon & Garfunkel’s debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, Paul Simon headed to London, where he played folk music in English pubs and enjoyed a small amount of success.

Simon drew inspiration from the music coming out of England at the time, and like Bob Dylan, later worked elements of English folk song lyrics and melodies into his own work. The best known example is the recording of ‘Scarborough Fair’ that appeared on a future Simon & Garfunkel album.

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Song of the Day #1,169: ‘The Train’ – Frank Sinatra

Here we are, at our final stop on the Watertown journey, suitably titled ‘The Train.’

How will the story end? With reconciliation or despair? Anybody familiar with Sinatra’s torch albums should know the answer.

‘The Train’ starts out positively buoyant, as the husband checks the weather, checks his watch, and prepares to meet his returning wife at the train station. He’s had “so many nights to find the way,” another clue that this break-up can’t be placed entirely on her shoulders.

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Song of the Day #1,168: ‘She Says’ – Frank Sinatra

The most important song on Frank Sinatra’s Watertown, plot-wise, is the worst musically.

The penultimate track, ‘She Says,’ uses an Ennio Morricone-esque call and answer technique and a creepy kids chorus to dramatize the wife’s decision to return home to her husband and children.

It’s dramatic, sure, but also more than a little silly. Even the bridge, the song’s most effective moment musically, blows it with the cliched lyric “the price is high, high as the sky.”

Can the same pair responsible for the rest of this gorgeous, subtle album possibly be behind this song? (The answer is yes.)

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Song of the Day #1,167: ‘What’s Now is Now’ – Frank Sinatra

On the eighth track of Frank Sinatra’s Watertown, we finally learn the cause of the broken marriage that’s been dissected over the rest of the album — an affair.

Of course, as we learned in When Harry Met Sally, infidelity is a symptom of something else in the marriage that’s wrong (to which Harry retorts, “Well, that symptom is fucking my wife”). In this case, those symptoms are left to our imagination, or hinted at in the margins of the songs preceding this one.

I’ve always wondered if the husband is learning about this affair for the first time after his wife has left, or if he knew about the affair prior to her leaving. The song builds, musically, with the force of revelation, but the question is whether that’s for our sake or his.

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