The album Paul Simon was happy to admit really reflected him: “The most accurate”
Despite now living more decades out of it than in it, Paul Simon will forever be known as one part of a duo. He’ll forever be the ‘Simon’ to the ‘& Garfunkel’, and there’s really no escaping it, unfortunately. It made for a tough break when the two split, but eventually Simon felt like he’d made an album reflective, solely, of him.
The water runs even deeper than that. While Simon & Garfunkel emerged in 1964 with their debut, the two men had been tied together since the early 1950s. They became friends in 1953 and started singing together. In 1956, they wrote their first song together, and from that moment on, the path was clear. First, they walked it together in doo-wop groups or as their early duo, Tom and Jerry, and eventually, it was walked as the band the world knows now.
So their breakdown was more than just a breakup of a band. It was a splintering separation between two lifelong friends who had taken each step of their careers together thus far. Their passion was tethered to the other as they were there at the beginning, so as they began to grow apart, the music suffered too. Their final album together captures that as Bridge over Troubled Water sees the two processing their feelings towards the split on tape, contemplating where it puts them if they still want to make music but can no longer do it together.
But it was only after the final break that they set about actually trying to figure that out, or reckoning with the depth of the water under that bridge and how deep their connection went.
That’s why Simon took his time. After the band released their last record in 1970, it took him two years to reappear. He could’ve moved fast, simply continued the sound of the band on a solo album and kept the hype going. But instead, he wanted to take the time to fully tear himself away from that and discover what it would be like to stand on his own, and what that would sound like in his music for arguably the first time in his life.
“I’m really happy to be by myself and not have to share the decisions,” he said when he finally realised the freedom in being a solo artist. “Now I do things almost entirely to my taste. That’s not to say I don’t listen to other opinions,” he explained, “But the new album [self-titled] is probably the most accurate one I’ve ever made, in the sense that it sounds the way I want it to sound.”
To him, his 1972 solo debut is the purest depiction of himself as an individual. While everything prior had had to balance Simon with Garfunkel, this could be all him without dilution and compromise. The sound of that turned out to be something varied and creative, bringing in far more different textures than the band had dealt with. Simon started exploring the more global sounds that would come in more prominently on Graceland. It’s an eclectic record that mixes genres and instrumentation in a unique way, still with the folk basis that was distinct to the duo.
But this wasn’t a duo album. This was all Simon, and because of that, he saw it as a far more accurate portrait of who he was.
