‘Song for the Asking’: Paul Simon’s sorry last word on Simon & Garfunkel
Music history is littered with sad splits. Bands come and bands go, but the loss of each one is a grief. For the fans, yes, but mostly, and most sharply, for the musicians themselves. A group is more than just a musical project – it’s a tangle of personal connections, time spent together, love for one another and an understanding of the others that goes so much deeper than the usual friendship, powered by the vulnerability art demands. In the case of Simon and Garfunkel, it was a lifetime. So the grief was heavy when two old friends splintered.
The splinter is heard loud and clear on Bridge Over Troubled Water, their fifth and final album. The band’s climb to the top had been a fascinating one. Starting out as best friends with a little doo-wop group, then a duo called Tom and Jerry, before eventually taking the form the world knows them in – even still, their path wasn’t smooth.
Can a path ever be smooth when fame is involved? When the world’s eyes are watching, their ears listening, and a whole hoard of big bosses in suits are throwing expectations and opportunities at you, all piling on top of the natural challenge of two friends trying to work and grow together – can it ever be easy? If you asked Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon, even now decades on from the rockiness of it all, they’d likely still say no.
Only six years after their debut, they were making what they both knew would be their last album. Or, more accurately, Paul Simon was making it. As one of the death knells to the band, Art Garfunkel has flown off to make a movie, leaving Simon behind not only to make the record but to grieve while he did so.
That’s what’s heard on the release – a man mourning the loss of a long-term friendship, saying his goodbyes to an important chapter and trying his best to do it justice despite the pain. It feels like Simon’s attempt to process it all with songs like the deeply poignant ‘Only Living Boy In New York’ serving as therapy sessions as Simon sings, “Hey, let your honesty shine, shine, shine now,” a lyric that really just says to his friend, ‘Just talk to me, tell me the truth, I know this is over.’
But as the album sense, seemingly so too does Simon’s processing. Their final album as a duo ends with a fully solo track, the only song on the album to feature Simon’s voice alone. It’s almost as if ‘Song For The Asking’ was tagged on at the last minute as a surprise, kind of like a breakup letter left in a book handed back to the other person, like a confession for them to find, as if Simon needed to say something to Garfunkel so decided to whisper it at the end here.
It’s short and sweet at only one minute and 50 seconds. The lyrics are sparse but somehow still so heavy as Simon sings, “Thinking it over, I’ve been sad / Thinking it over, I’d be more than glad / To change my ways for the asking / Ask me and I will play / All the love that I hold inside.” It sounds like one last final plea, a last-ditch ‘I promise I can change.’”
In a documentary about the process of making the record, Simon speaks tenderly of the track, explaining, “That’s just to say I haven’t forgotten what I did. I was not an angel, that’s for sure.” To him, ‘Song For The Asking’, is exactly what it feels like – a tender confession, a last attempt of an apology, a sorry goodbye.
