The 1983 song Paul Simon called better than ‘The Sound of Silence’: “A greater impact”
Paul Simon never really had a say in which songs of his managed to get popular.
He was only out there to make the best tunes that he could in the moment whenever he played, and once they were out there in the wild, there was no telling what would happen to tunes like ‘The Sound of Silence’ once they became the biggest anthems of the 1960s. But even if Simon liked the idea of having classic songs, he wasn’t all that secretive about the ones that deserved a bit more praise than his classics.
Then again, Simon was always going to have a tough relationship with ‘The Sound of Silence’ to begin with. He had written the song as a folk commentary on how the nature of man had gone sour, and once he heard the song coming out of the speakers as a folk-rock hit, he wasn’t exactly thrilled. He wanted to make music as he intended, and when his record company ended up fiddling around with his song, he was going to spend the rest of his life trying to make tracks that sounded closer to what he heard in his head.
That’s half the reason why he and Art Garfunkel couldn’t work together after a while, but that also explained why he would eventually move completely out of the folk-rock tradition. He wanted the chance to make songs that had a bit more of a rhythm to them, and you can hear him starting to stray away from his roots on records like his self-titled debut or Still Crazy After All These Years.
He was still happy to play some of the old songs, but he didn’t want to be defined by them, either. The same thing could be said of when he worked on Graceland as well, given that most people wanted him to be making world music for the rest of his life after that, he was already working in a different world on songs like ‘The Obvious Child’, and when looking at a song like ‘Hearts and Bones’, Simon felt that he had grown to be a much better songwriter than that kid in his 20s trying to write about the problems in the world.
‘The Sound of Silence’ is still going to resonate years later, but Simon felt that he had outdone himself by the time he reached some of his solo songs, saying, “When you do a piece that’s good, and it becomes a hit, it gets into the mainstream of the culture and has a great impact. ‘Sound of Silence’ has had a greater impact than ‘Hearts and Bones’, and I wrote ‘Sound of Silence’ when I was 21, and ‘Hearts and Bones’ is, I think, a better song. But ‘Sound of Silence’ was a big hit, and it’s in the culture.”
And in the world of pop music, the culture rules above everything else. Everyone can remember where they were when they heard ‘The Sound of Silence’ if they lived through it, and while Simon was able to hold his own next to some of the greatest singer-songwriters of the time, there’s a reason why a tune like that resonates a lot better than some of the more experimental music that he’s made.
But across his discography, Simon never really had a record that anyone could consider a complete dud. There are still a few that don’t seem to have any major hit singles on them or anything, but when you look at the craftsmanship behind everything, he was still trying to make the kind of songs that the kid in Simon & Garfunkel would have only dreamed of creating back in the early 1960s.
Songs like ‘Hearts and Bones’might only be reserved for the more hardcore fans of his work, but he wasn’t going to spend his life losing sleep over it, either. He was happy to have made something that resonated with a lot of people, and a lot of the biggest songs of his career were tunes that he could look back on with pride.
