Paul Simon’s favourite song on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’: “That big voice”
By the time of their fifth and final album in 1970, folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel were at the zenith of their careers. Following the mammoth success of Bookends and The Graduate soundtrack, the pair looked set to enter the 1970s during a creative home run as strong as The Rolling Stones or The Kinks.
Yet behind the dizzying record sales and critical acclaim, grievances and tensions started to weigh heavily on old friends Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Setting aside enough of their differences to craft another album, Bridge Over Troubled Water proved to be their most acclaimed album, eventually becoming a Platinum seller with a title track that was covered by everybody from Elvis Presley to Aretha Franklin.
Rifts began to test the duo when Garfunkel began to pursue an acting career. Staying on Blue Jay Way in the Hollywood Hills to accommodate Garfunkel’s filming of Catch-22, the pair sketched out songs with a Sony recorder and a piano before taking the ideas to the various Columbia studios in Los Angeles, New York, and Nashville to be fleshed out. While his creative partner was way away in Mexico for location shooting, Simon battled private feelings of isolation and waning connection for one of Bridge Over Troubled Water‘s most celebrated cuts.
Released as the B-side to ‘Cecilia’, ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ is peppered with implicit allusions to the duo’s long performing history, the first line “Tom, get your plane right on time” a reference to their days billed as Tom & Jerry in the late 1050s. A sense of their parting ways hovers with lines like “Half of the time we’re gone/But we don’t know where”, easily mistaken as the heartache of a romantic break-up if the context wasn’t known.
An extra prickle of animus informed the song’s writing, Simon was initially cast in Catch-22 but was cut last minute due to the abundance of characters in the anti-war satire. His ode to his partner in a far-flung land served as the creative culmination of knowing exactly how each other works and the rewards that can be reaped from shifting away from their typical approach to harmony. “The thing that I learned at the end of S&G was how to make an interesting album, was to let Artie do his thing, and let me do my thing, and come together for a thing,” Simon told Rolling Stone in 1972.
He added: “All of the other albums up until then, they’re almost all harmony on every song. How much can you do with two voices? You can sing thirds, or you can sing fifths, or you can do a background harmony. Something like ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’, where we create that big voice, all those voices in the background. That’s my favourite one on that whole album, actually. The first time those background voices come in.”
Selecting his exorcism of drifting pathways from his old musical comrade is quite the choice among S&G’s lauded songbook, but perhaps illustrative of the fact that beneath the fall-outs and acrimony that plagues their relationship, an unspoken veneration shines underneath the bullshit.
