The 1970 song Paul Simon never wanted to write again: “Too daunting”
Paul Simon lived to take as many risks as he wanted to with his songs.
The entire reason why Simon and Garfunkel worked so well was because of him thinking outside the box, but after a while, there came a point where they needed to shake things up if they wanted to keep themselves afloat. But when they reached the end of their career, Simon wasn’t going to knock himself down to work with his partner. They were on different creative pages, and it was time for him to start thinking about new avenues to work on.
And when you look at Simon’s debut compared to Art Garfunkel’s, it’s like night and day. While Simon technically put out one solo album when the duo broke up for a hot second before ‘The Sound of Silence’ took off, his 1972 album was much more in line with what he wanted to do. His music was centred around working out different rhythms, and you can definitely feel him trying to work in different sounds into his catalogue.
That’s not to say that Garfunkel’s songs are all bad by any metric. ‘Bright Eyes’ and ‘All I Know’ are fantastic ballads from him, but that might be the biggest problem. When you think about Simon’s songwriting past 1971, do you hear many ballads? Sure, there are some songs that have a slower tempo than normal, but when you listen to ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’, it has a lot more energy than anything that he was making back in the day, when ‘Homeward Bound’ was his biggest calling card.
But if ‘The Sound of Silence’ was something he was proud of, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ was practically an albatross around his neck. He had written one of the finest ballads that’s good enough to be played in church at this point, but when someone hits upon a song with that kind of power behind it, everyone’s going to want him to make another tune that sounds exactly like that right after.
Which is strange for someone who didn’t even sing the damn song. Simon did have a few resentments about not singing the song and giving it to Garfunkel, but maybe that was a blessing in disguise. Because if you look at where he would go in his solo career, Simon felt a lot more comfortable knowing that he never had to go back to his guitar and create the more lightweight tunes of his career.
He wasn’t getting heavy by any stretch, but he felt that making ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ was the first and last time he was ever going to create something that huge, saying, “We would have broken up anyway because Artie thrives on big ballads and I like to write rhythm and Artie doesn’t like to sing rhythm. The thought of having to write a ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ every album is too daunting, given what happened with ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. So he went his way and sang the songs that he wanted to sing and I began doing what I like to do.”
And given that Simon was ready to move on to different things, it’s not like he was itching for hits the same way that he was in the 1960s. There were plenty more interesting things to worry about than the pop charts, and if he could try his hand at genres like ska and manage to get a hit out of it, he would do that rather than going into the studio and breaking out the big orchestras all over again.
You could still hear that Simon was the same songwriter he’d always been on those first solo records, but something fundamentally important had happened in the transition. He was going to be making music that came from his heart before anything else, and he didn’t care in the slightest about whether or not it was radio-friendly every single time he wrote something.
