“I didn’t even know what I was playing”: how Simon and Garfunkel stumbled into a 1968 classic
Paul Simon is a songwriter who typically takes his craft extremely seriously, with no room for shortcuts, and is willing to walk over hot coals in order to ensure songwriting perfection.
However, he has written hundreds of songs throughout his career, and not every one of them needed countless hours of effort. Sometimes a song simply flows out naturally, something made possible by all the hard work Simon had already put into mastering songwriting. As a result, there were occasions where he wrote classics with surprising ease.
Although artists typically have a strong grasp on whether a song will go on to resonate with fans, it’s impossible to be certain that it will stand the test of time. While it can be agonising to pour your heart and soul into a track that audiences don’t take to, on the other hand, it can be a lovely, unexpected victory when they get it wildly wrong and a throwaway track becomes a classic.
Luck plays its part in the success of every group, to varying degrees, especially in the case of Simon and Garfunkel. Without the unexpected success of ‘The Sound of Silence’ reuniting Simon and Garfunkel, their careers and lives would have looked drastically different. After becoming stars, Simon waved goodbye to his new life in England, returned to America, and took advantage of topping the singles chart.
Three years later, Simon and Garfunkel regained their rightful place at the top of the singles chart in the United States thanks to ‘Mrs Robinson’, which was a happy accident.
The song, which appeared on the soundtrack for the Mike Nichols film The Graduate, had been rumbling around before Nichols contacted them for a contribution to the movie, but they had no idea what to do with it. Initially, the duo didn’t offer the hit song to the director and instead offered up ‘Punky’s Dilemma’ and ‘Overs’, which Nichols didn’t feel were appropriate fits.
After facing rejection, Simon revisited the half-finished ‘Mrs Roosevelt’, which he altered to ‘Mrs. Robinson’. At that stage, it had yet to include a verse, but as soon as Nichols heard the composition, he knew it was a perfect fit for his film despite being incomplete.
During an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, Simon explained: “Mike Nichols called and asked. He said he had a book and he was gonna make a film called The Graduate… He convinced us to do the music. The music was supposed to be mostly original music, but what would happen is that in order to fill up a scene, we would take a piece of music and put it there just to hear what music would sound like.”
Elaborating on the creative process, Simon revealed: “‘Mrs Robinson’ was made up on the spot. That was originally supposed to be a chase scene, and they wanted guitar music”.
“I was playing… I didn’t even know what I was playing, just riffing on guitar.”
For Simon, who has often driven himself to the brink in order to accomplish his songwriting goals, ‘Mrs Robinson’ was a refreshingly easy task, even if it didn’t have a deep, personal meaning. He told Cavett: “It’s very pleasurable to write in a stream-of-consciousness style, and very often you find that what is in your mind is relevant, although at the moment it doesn’t seem so. Then I asked myself later what it meant, and I said, ‘Well, it means something. It’ll mean something.'”
Simon’s songwriting partner, Art Garfunkel, later confessed they may have never released the song if it wasn’t for Nichols’ intervention. According to Song Facts, he went as far as labelling ‘Mrs. Robinson’ a “trifle song we were about to throw out”.
Thankfully, things turned out differently, and the film provided the ammunition they needed to get ‘Mrs Robinson’ up to scratch. Still, even once it was completed, neither Simon nor Garfunkel ever foresaw it becoming a number one record and one of their most defining creations.
