The song Paul Simon said was better than ‘The Sound of Silence’: “More complex”
Music history is filled with romantic tales that flourished before crumbling like a broken empire. Most of these began like explosions, like two star-crossed lovers finally discovering home in one another before everything comes crashing down. This is what it felt like when Carrie Fisher met Paul Simon, or, as she once put it, “Every so often, you meet someone from your tribe.”
Along with some of the biggest couplings in history – Kurt and Courtney, Stevie and Lindsey, Johnny and June, John and Yoko – this one seemed a tumultuous affair maintained only by their shared love and infatuation for one another, bringing them together then pushing them apart then bringing them together again before finally, pushing them apart once more. It’s something you might see in a romcom, where the two leads can’t seem to sit still long enough to work out the frayed edges of their perfect romance.
But the foundations were there, as Simon and Fisher had experienced a similar upbringing, both earning their names young and trying to navigate an industry that doesn’t always make sense. Like bonding in the trenches, Fisher and Simon found solace in one another and a promise that when things feel intense in the outside world, they always had someone who understood what it was like to stand in the crossfire.
In all fairness, however, we can (and have) analysed the details of their relationship for years, with conversations varying from the nature of two perfectly placed pieces of a whole realising it’s not meant to be to how such worlds could collide with that amount of passion and energy in the first place. But when you look at it closely, really closely, it makes complete sense. Fisher was a powerhouse with a sense of humour that could set even the driest situations alight. Simon was a thinker, a quiet romantic whose openness worked well with her intensity.
And much of it was immortalised beautifully in Simon’s song ‘Hearts and Bones’. Beyond setting a professional challenge for himself to write more meticulously than ever before, ‘Hearts and Bones’ captured the complicated nature of the pair’s relationship, highlighting the highs and lows of a love destined to build and build before erupting into irreparable fragments: “Two people were married, the act was outrageous, the bride was contagious,” he sung.
According to Simon, the song is better than one of his most popular hits, ‘The Sound of Silence’. “I wrote ‘The Sound of Silence’ when I was 21 and ‘Hearts and Bones’ is, I think, a better song,” he told Brue Pollock in 1986. “But ‘Sound of Silence’ was a big hit, and it’s in the culture. 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.”
Elsewhere, he also said the characters in the song are autobiographical and that it’s probably the only song on the album that he actually liked (probably because it was his most open and honest, reflective of his new ability to write with more charge). As a result, its beauty doesn’t come from the fact that it lays the perils of their relationship bare, it’s in the way he’s able to weave these moments in like a natural part of their story, always delicate and on the brink of something nondescript, signalling a songwriting shift that’s too gorgeous to be picked apart for what it really is.
As Fisher later concluded, “I do like the songs he wrote about our relationship. Even when he’s insulting me, I like it very much.”
