The one lyric in Paul Simon’s 1969 masterpiece that he is still “embarrassed” by
There have been a few occasions in Paul Simon’s career when he has sat down to write a song and felt such a surge of inspiration that it is like he is being breathed “upon by God”.
When he is in a state of what psychologists term ‘creative flow’, he finds that words and music unfurl “very freely from a source that you can’t identify. It has a natural quality to it. And sometimes something more to it,” Paul Simon reflected in the Big Issue.
You actually can sense this zone of divination in Simon’s music. Often, his songs seamlessly glide, their words and melodies beautifully dovetailed in a way that defies the notion that folk should be roughshod.
To this day, he remembers the first time that the feeling befell him. “When I wrote ‘The Sound of Silence’, when I was 22, I thought, ‘Well, that’s probably my best song. I can close this set with this.’” It might have taken a fortuitous remix by producer Tom Wilson to become a hit, but either way, he was on his bike in the songwriting big leagues.
So, he sought after that ’flow’ feeling more and more, like a surfer after their first wave. It didn’t take him all that long to happen upon it again. “When I wrote ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, I thought, ‘That’s better than I usually write’. And it came quickly.”
These jolts of seemingly divine inspiration didn’t stop there either. “Same happened with the song ‘Graceland’,” he concludes. “There are times when you’re in what you could call ‘flow’. When it’s easy to write and time doesn’t exist.”
However, it is notable that perhaps his greatest song escaped a mention in that mini list. ‘The Boxer’ perfectly captures what people love about Simon & Garfunkel. Recorded in November 1968 and released the following March, it exemplifies the extraordinary oxymorons woven into the duo’s unique music: it is dainty yet hymnal, it is so distinctly New York that you can practically smell sordid hot dogs and feel the shadow of towering buildings, yet it is also timelessly universal.
And while plenty would argue that it was perfect, Simon remains “embarrassed” by one recurring line that he still rues to this day. You see, the issue with a flow state is that while it might represent a balm of inspiration, sometimes things can feel a little too easy. When you’re racing forward with the breath of God upon your neck, you tend not to say, ‘Hang on a minute, big man, I’ve just got to steady on and work out this line for a minute’.
That’s particularly true when it comes to the pressurised world of the music industry. When Simon & Garfunkel were recording the song in late ‘68, they were the biggest duo in the world by some margin. However, they were keen to solidify that status. But with Art Garfunkel signing on for film commitments, and Simon growing agitated with an expensive roster of musicians booked in, they had to get a bit of a wiggle on.
The homily nature of Simon’s honed music often means that the listener disregards such trivialities as deadlines and administrative pressures, but coupled with the fleeting nature of the free state of flow, the confluence produced his most regrettable line in one of his least regrettable songs.
In ‘The Boxer’, the picture that Simon paints is literary in its exacting nature. But what exactly does the grand chorus convey? Well, Simon reveals that the nonlexical vocable of “Lie-la-lie” is nothing more than a melodic placeholder. “I didn’t have any words!” he said of the fraught recording session, and how it produced a lamentably vacant chorus.
It says a lot about the nature of the song that people thought otherwise. “Then people said it was ‘lie’ but I didn’t really mean that. That it was a lie,” Simon recalled, “But, it’s not a failure of songwriting, because people like that and they put enough meaning into it, and the rest of the song has enough power and emotion, I guess, to make it go, so it’s all right.”
Yet, as a perfectionist, time and pressure permitting, Simon might have woven the boxer’s tale into a much more meaningful chorus. This has plagued him ever since. “For me,” he said, “Every time I sing that part… [softly], I’m a little embarrassed,” he told SongTalk in 1990.
But while it remains mystically unfinished in Simon’s eyes, maybe that ties into why it is a masterpiece. Although, to be honest, I could personally do without the OTT drums, as well.
