The “more interesting” solo song Paul Simon called better than ‘The Sound of Silence’
Being an artist means constantly challenging yourself to be better than your last work. No matter the praise or adulation it received, the last work is always in the past, and an artist must focus on the future. For this, and many other reasons, it wasn’t always easy for Paul Simon to appreciate his own work.
The legendary singer-songwriter was just a teenager when he experienced his first bits of radio success, initially with longtime singing partner Art Garfunkel in a 1950s doo-wop duo called Tom & Jerry. By the time the pair began recording music under their own names, the folk boom had caused Simon to adapt his lyrical style. He was still incredibly young when his first major hit, ‘The Sound of Silence’, went to number one.
The track is still, to this day, considered one of the archetypal tracks of the 1960s. It is endlessly used among TV and film and finds itself as a cultural touchpoint six decades after its release. The track was written in fortuitous circumstances: “It was just when I was coming out of college. My job was to take the songs that this huge publishing company owned and go around to record companies and see if any of their artists wanted to record the songs. I worked for them for about six months and never got a song placed, but I did give them a couple of my songs because I felt so guilty about taking their money. Then I got into an argument with them and said, ‘Look, I quit, and I’m not giving you my new song.’ And the song that I had just written was ‘The Sound of Silence.’ I thought, ‘I’ll just publish it myself,’ and from that point on I owned my own songs, so that was a lucky argument.”
As Simon aged, so too did his approach to lyric writing. Even though he could feel the evolution happening, that didn’t always coincide with public attention or critical acclaim. Simon’s 1983 album Hearts and Bones is a gutwrenching look at his failing marriage to Carrie Fisher, told through some of his most insightful and personal words that ever appeared under his name. But the album was considered a flop when it was first released.
“I wrote ‘The Sound of Silence’ when I was 21 and ‘Hearts and Bones’ is, I think, a better song. But ‘Sounds of Silence’ was a big hit and it’s in the culture,” Simon told writer Bruce Pollack in 1986. “When you talk about a popular art, as the writing gets more complex and more layered, it’s harder to have a lot of people who really like it.”
“It is easier to have a smaller group of people who are more intensely devoted to you,” Simon added. “It’s natural that this should happen in my development. I was a rock star at one point. I had many years of being a rock star. I don’t want to be a rock star anymore.”
“The language starts to get more interesting in Hearts and Bones. The imagery started to get a little interesting,” Simon would later tell SongTalk in 1990. “What I was trying to learn to do was to be able to write vernacular speech and then intersperse it with enriched language. And then go back to vernacular. So the thing would go along smoothly and then some image would come out that was interesting and then it would go back to this very smooth, conversational thing.”
“By the time I got to Graceland, I was trying to let that kind of enriched language flow naturally, so that you wouldn’t really notice it as much,” he claimed. “I think in Hearts and Bones you could feel it, that it was coming.”
Even Fisher herself could feel it. Just before her death in 2016, Fisher admitted to being a fan of ‘Hearts and Bones’, even if it didn’t paint her in the most flattering light. “I do like the songs he wrote about our relationship,” Fisher told Rolling Stone in 2016. “Even when he’s insulting me, I like it very much.”
Check out ‘Hearts and Bones’ down below.
