The song Paul Simon said Simon and Garfunkel were incapable of: “It wouldn’t have been the same”
No rock band can truly claim to be the most eclectic musicians on the planet. Sure, they might boast a more diverse record collection than their peers, but sooner or later, every act hits a wall—either veering off course or settling into a formula where everything starts to blur together. Paul Simon had a signature style when it came to songwriting, but he was also self-aware enough to recognise the limits of Simon & Garfunkel, knowing there were musical territories they simply wouldn’t explore.
Then again, it’s better to get some of the easy genres out of the way first. Given how much folk acts like Bob Dylan influenced Simon, it was clear that he was interested in more straightforward songwriting. That meant that he was never going to be making the equivalent of a Funkadelic record, and had he gone down the road of making hip-hop instead of world music in the 1980s, the thought of him working with someone like Run DMC or A Tribe Called Quest is too horrifying for words.
Still, Simon did have diversity in his sound if you know where to look for it. Still Crazy After All These Years has its roots in genres like jazz, and when listening to him work off of South African musicians on Graceland made for some of the finest tunes of his later career, like ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.’ But that ingenuity always hindered what Simon and Garfunkel were good at.
The duo’s vocal synthesis always relied on making songs that everyone could relate to, and by the time Bridge Over Troubled Water started, it was clear he needed a more constructive outlet for where he would be going. And listening to his first solo album, it was clear that many of the songs were tracks that Simon had been working on in the background during the duo’s glory years.
‘Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard’ may have had a bit more pep in it than the average Simon and Garfunkel song, but ‘Mother and Child Reunion’ was a bit more of a radical departure. Simon had touched on more serious subjects before, but hearing him adopt a reggae groove was probably not going to pass Garfunkel’s eye, given the fact that he had already nixed songs like ‘Cuba Si Nixon No’ from their last album.
So, while Simon admitted to loving the song, he felt that he and Garfunkel could have never done justice to it had they compromised, saying, “I wanted to sing other types of songs that Simon and Garfunkel wouldn’t do. ‘Mother and Child Reunion,’ for example, is not a song that you would have normally thought that Simon and Garfunkel would have done. It’s possible that they might have. But it wouldn’t have been the same, and I don’t know whether I would have been so inclined in that direction.”
However, compared to the same person who wrote ‘The Sound of Silence,’ it was clear that this song was meant as the next step. Most people didn’t have this kind of range in their songwriting at the time, but if Simon was one of the few who could inhabit different genres, it would have been a musical crime to keep everything stifled for so long.
So, really, it’s probably a blessing in disguise that Simon and Garfunkel broke up when they did. Each of them needed to do their own things, and even if we would have loved to hear another timeless classic like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’ there’s a chance that they might not have wanted to make music at all after a while.
