Tag Archives: Simon & Garfunkel

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Song of the Day #1,163: ‘Sparrow’ – Simon & Garfunkel

It seems appropriate a week after I named Paul Simon as my favorite songwriter to explore his work in more detail. Welcome to Paul Simon Weekends!

Over the next few months, I will explore Simon’s work both with Simon & Garfunkel and as a solo artist. His career has spanned 47 years and 16 studio albums, plus a soundtrack and several live records. Lots of blog fodder there. So let’s dive right in with the 1964 debut of Simon & Garfunkel.

Wednesday Morning, 3 AM is a modest little folk record, released quietly in 1964 and quickly forgotten. It features five Paul Simon originals and seven covers of classic folk songs. The duo cover ‘Peggy-O’ and ‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’ as well as a track by one of Simon’s heroes — Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.’

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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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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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