The 1970 song Paul Simon called musical “fluff”
While it may have been the final thing the duo ever produced together, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water is perhaps one of the finest examples of an act bowing out with grace.
Their swan song record consists of some of Paul Simon’s best songwriting and Art Garfunkel’s wonderful vocal performances, and while it may have come as something of a disappointment for fans of the pair that they’d call it quits so soon after hitting their stride, they left them with a glorious demonstration of what they were capable of that could be cherished forever.
Arriving in 1970, it ought to have served as a window into what was to come for both artists as they entered into a new decade, but while Simon continued to flourish in his solo career, Garfunkel unfortunately took the decision to step back from his musical career, only producing a meagre amount of solo material in the early 1970s and instead choosing to pursue both a career in film and in academia.
Despite going down remarkably different paths, that doesn’t take away from the fact that they’d achieved so much together. However, even though there was a plethora of material on Bridge Over Troubled Water that seemed as though it took an immense amount of effort and patience to create, given how elegant and intricate the songs were, there was one song that Simon insists came about almost by accident, and where he completely followed his instincts to effortlessly construct it.
According to an interview with Rolling Stone, Simon attested that ‘Cecilia’ came about as a result of him experimenting with a rhythm over time and suddenly realising that it could form the basis of a song. “Every day I’d come back from the studio, working on whatever we were working on,” he recalled, “and I’d play this pounding thing. So then I said, ‘Let’s make a record out of that.’”
After recording him slapping out a rhythmic pattern for him to use as the backbone, he suddenly began to realise exactly how to piece together all of the other elements of the track. “We copied it over and extended it double the amount,” he continued. “So now we have three minutes of track, and the track is great. So now I pick up the guitar and I start to go, ‘Well, this will be like the guitar part,’” he said, adding in a vocalised interpretation of the rhythm in the form of “dung chicka dung chicka dung.”
However, the final key element that was absent from the song at this point was the lyrics, and while some people tend to put painstaking amounts of effort into deciding on the right words, Simon proclaimed that these were just as easy to come by as the rest of the track had been.
“The lyrics were virtually the first lines I said,” he noted, referring to “You’re breakin’ my heart, I’m down on my knees,” as the first words heard after the call of the titular woman’s name. “They’re not lines at all, but it was right for that song, and I like that. It was like a little piece of magical fluff, but it works.”
It may have seemed like fluff to Simon, but these throwaway lines ended up producing one of the album’s most beloved songs and an impeccable highlight of how good they’d become at the time of their final swan song.
