“I insist”: the song Paul Simon refused to sing
If you’d written a song as good as ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, you’d be pretty damn chuffed with yourself, wouldn’t you? Regularly regarded as one of the greatest songs of all time, reaching number one in six different countries and going platinum and gold in the UK and US, respectively, it’s not the sort of thing you’d want to ever distance yourself from or ever hold any deep-seated regrets about. Paul Simon must surely recognise that.
While Simon and Garfunkel enjoyed large amounts of success with many other tracks such as ‘The Sound of Silence’, ‘America’ and ‘Mrs Robinson’, the song most universally recognised as being their crowning achievement was ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Coming right at the end of their career as a duo, it served as one of the finest swan songs they could possibly go out on.
Sure, both also successfully established themselves as solo acts in the years after its release in 1970, so it’s not they’re still dining out on the success of that track and album alone, but it would be incredibly surprising if both artists held any sort of resentment towards the song, or even had their doubts about its viability as a single. However, just a couple of years after its release, Simon revealed many secrets about the song’s origins that would suggest that he didn’t always have a great deal of confidence in his composition, and Art Garfunkel wasn’t totally sure about it either.
Speaking to Don Heckman of the New York Times in 1972, Simon revealed that he was surprised at how successful the song was and doesn’t even recall how or when he wrote the song. “It doesn’t feel attached to me at all,” he told the journalist. “At the time, there was no sense that it would be a hit of such enormous proportions. We were just working on a record, and we were fighting.”
Because Garfunkel was already mentally and physically elsewhere during the recording of the album, having been working on the film Catch 22 in Rome, he seemed to be distant from the song when Simon initially played the song to him. With Simon having written the melody to fit Garfunkel’s higher vocal range, he had always intended for it to be a track that ‘Artie’ would have taken the lead on, but upon first hearing the track, Garfunkel didn’t seem to agree that he should be the vocalist.
“Well, I like it,” Simon recalled Garfunkel telling him, “but maybe you should do it.” Simon himself was incensed at the idea and claimed that his response was to say, “No, I insist that you do it.” Reflecting on his adamant reaction in the interview, Simon added, “I don’t know why I insisted so much. Maybe I should analyse myself to find out why I insisted to that degree. I thought possibly it wouldn’t even be a good single.”
Of course, Art Garfunkel performed the lead vocals in one of the most sublimely controlled vocal performances of his career. Had Simon not been as insistent on his performing partner singing it, it’s hard to imagine it possessing the same emotional impact as the song, let alone being as successful as it was.
