The 1970 song Paul Simon said he needed to disown: “Not as good a feeling”
Paul Simon knows all too well that some songs can feel like your children after a while.
Even though you have to finish them at some point and release them into the world, there’s no telling in what context they’re going to appear in your life afterwards, whether they’ll be used for good or completely misunderstood. But after a while, Simon felt that it was time for him to take a few songs from his repertoire and give up the fact that he was the only person who made the song a classic.
Because even though Simon wrote all the songs, you have to acknowledge Art Garfunkel’s presence on all of those early tunes. Their rendition of ‘Scarborough Fair’ with Simon’s ‘Canticle’ already sounds beautiful on its own, but when you look at the way that they sing over top of everything, the whole thing turns into one of the most beautiful songs that they had ever written together. But even if Bookends was where Simon felt things started, not everything worked out how it should on that record.
In fact, Bookends already feels like two albums in one in many respects, with the second side being a bunch of songs that they had already used in one form or another. The real test of their partnership was always going to be Bridge Over Troubled Water, but the way that they structured that record felt a lot more ramshackle than before. Neither of them were speaking to each other as regularly as they used to, and even when they were deciding the track order, Simon got one of his songs nixed by Garfunkel because it was too political.
The silver lining should have been the title track of the record, but there was already going to be some baggage with that as well. Simon did have a few hangups about not being the one who sang the song every single time they played, but even though Garfunkel took a lot of the praise in that regard for turning it into a classic, Simon firmly admitted that the song didn’t even deserve to belong to him, either.
Even when compared to ‘The Sound of Silence’, Simon felt that ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ has become more of a hymn for the planet than anything else, saying, “I don’t feel that ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ even belongs to me. When I think about it now, I first think of an elevator. It makes me laugh – it’s nice to have any song that you write played in an elevator. That’s not as good a feeling, though, as walking down the street and hearing somebody sing a song of yours.”
I’d argue the opposite, though. There comes a point where almost any legendary songwriter has songs that almost belong on easy listening stations, and while that can be a little bit of an albatross around their neck sometimes, I’m sure Paul McCartney doesn’t get as jaded when Yesterday’ is played over the loudspeakers or when Elton John walks into a Holiday Inn and hears ‘Your Song’.
It’s simply an appreciation for what the artist is doing, but from Simon’s perspective, he probably still hears all of the hours that he put into making the song sound perfect. It’s not easy to write a song that can stand alongside the greatest melodies of all time, but even if he based the song on a Bach chorale, those little inflexions that he put in the melody are so good that you could practically make an individual hit out of any single one of them.
So while Simon wanted to detach himself from the tune after too many years of hearing it, he will forever be associated with the tune the same way that someone like Keith Richards will be identified with ‘Satisfaction’. You can run away from the tune all you want, but sometimes the greatest melodies are so strong that they actually become part of the person’s DNA after a while.
