Is ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ really Simon and Garfunkel’s best album?
Yes, Bridge Over Troubled Water is the best Simon and Garfunkel album. It feels great to be able to confirm that with such overwhelming authority. It might even be the best thing either of the duo released in their respective careers. Better than Graceland? Yes, just about, I’d say. But why is it so revered and celebrated by fans and performers alike, and what about the album makes it so timeless and influential?
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had been gradually improving their output from their humble beginnings, which saw them combine occasional original material and covers of folk standards and contemporary classics to produce their own songs that blended folk and pop with the use of gorgeous interweaving harmonies and lush arrangements.
The leap in quality from 1964’s Wednesday Morning, 3 AM to Bookends a mere four years later is astounding, and while they would only release one more album together after this, they took that opportunity to create a career-defining masterpiece that has acted as a blueprint for modern folk music ever since. For an album released in 1970 to still be so vital to a genre that has continued to evolve in the subsequent years is nothing short of astounding, and while the album as a whole ought to be celebrated in its entirety for how well its songs gel together, each track taken individually should be praised in its own right.
Boasting one of the greatest and most controlled vocal performances of all time, the album opens with the title track—a ballad that immediately pulls the listener into the emotionally crushing world in which it was written. Both Simon and Garfunkel knew their time together as artists was nearing its end, with the strains in their relationship becoming increasingly fraught. While the song itself doesn’t directly reference their partnership, the sheer desperation in Garfunkel’s delivery, paired with Simon’s climactic and rousing piano performance, is enough to have you weeping within the first five minutes of the album.
But it isn’t just all about ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. ‘Cecilia’, ‘Keep The Customer Satisfied’, and ‘Baby Driver’ are all uptempo tracks that beautifully marry folk and pop in a way that few before them had successfully demonstrated, while ‘The Boxer’, ‘So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’ and ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ are all further examples of the exquisite balladry that they had perfected. Lyrically, Simon is at his most poignant over the course of this record, and while there are times when he saw fit to assume lead vocal duties, Garfunkel’s silken tenor is simply a joy to behold.
I could enthuse about the virtues of Bridge Over Troubled Water for hours, and it would appear that Simon could do the same. In a 1972 interview with Rolling Stone, the songwriter claimed that “Bridge has better songs” before going on to make further claims about its superiority over the rest of their output. “It has better singing. It is freer, in its own way.”
It’s the perfect final calling for a duo that changed the face of folk music and shaped it for several decades afterwards. The amount of detail that is put into every song, no matter how brief some of them may be, is a joy to behold, and it can’t really be seen as anything other than one of the greatest achievements not only in the genres of pop and folk music, but one of the most essential albums in recording history.
