The 2015 song Paul Simon said would still be around “in 100 years”
The art of following trends and playing the game of the industry was never that important for Paul Simon.
He liked the idea of honing his craft and writing the kind of songs that the true greats could be proud of, and even when working outside his comfort zone, tunes like ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ were brilliant exercises when he tapped into the world music zeitgeist. But even years after the names Simon and Garfunkel are distant memories, the songwriting genius knew that a few of his songs were going to go beyond traditional pop music.
Then again, not every artist is looking at their craft in that way. There’s nothing wrong with trying to hop on a trend and see what happens, and while there are always a few opportunities for people to come off as incredibly corny, there’s a reason why people like Madonna became trendsetters by tapping into whatever new technology was happening at the time. Image did have a lot of value, but Simon thought everything he needed could be found in that acoustic guitar.
After all, the biggest names in folk music could get thousands of fans singing along with only a simple catchy tune, and when Simon first began making records, he had the same kind of tactic. It’s just a shame that no one was around to hear it. Wednesday Morning 3 AM was full of fantastic tunes, but judging by how little response there was to it, it seemed that the world wasn’t ready for a version of folk music without Bob Dylan’s wit.
Simon simply wasn’t that kind of songwriter, but looking through the record, ‘The Sound of Silence’ was always going to have a certain magic about it. He may have only been in his 20s when he wrote it, but he was already acutely aware of the kind of darkness of the times in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. The times may have been dark, but it would prove to be a huge win for the duo when the song got re-recorded.
Part of what made the song so unusual was that it didn’t really belong to the protest tradition that dominated much of folk music in the mid-1960s. Bob Dylan had his finger pointed squarely at society, Phil Ochs was writing dispatches from the political front lines, and Joan Baez often wore her convictions proudly. Simon’s masterpiece, by contrast, was a little more internal. He dealt in alienation, loneliness and the strange disconnect that seemed to accompany modern life. Those feelings never really go out of fashion, which may explain why every generation seems to rediscover the song and hear something different in it.
Although the folk-rock angle wasn’t exactly what Simon had in mind when he wrote it, the whole thing resonated a lot better when there was a bit more punch to it. When Simon saw the reaction that the tune got when performing it live, though, he realised that the tune was bound to be played for generations to come.
Aside from his own versions over the years, Simon felt that what’s given the song its longevity is how many people continue to play it, saying, “I think if any of my songs have a chance of … lasting 100 years, I think it may be that one. I was looking on YouTube to hear some Andean flutes, you know, pan pipe flutes, for something that I thought about in the [current] show … and while I was looking for it, there was a Native American, he was just by himself and he was wearing a headdress, and he was playing ‘The Sound of Silence.’”
And given how many people have covered the tune, it’s not like it isn’t able to be used in different contexts. Anyone could play that melody as a solo acoustic performance and make it sound absolutely heartbreaking, and as aggro and off-putting as Disturbed can come off at times, David Draiman does, at the very least, know how to do justice to the tune when he sings their version of it.
That’s usually the mark of a standard. Great songs stop belonging exclusively to the people who wrote them and start taking on lives of their own. ‘The Sound of Silence’ has appeared in films, television shows and countless talent competitions, but perhaps its greatest trick is that it seems to survive almost any reinterpretation. Whether it’s rendered on pan pipes by a street musician, sung around a campfire, transformed into heavy metal bombast or stripped back to a lone voice and guitar, the melancholy at the heart of the song somehow remains intact. Few writers are lucky enough to create something so durable.
It’s not exactly the happiest song in the world, and it was bound to be a little bit haunting for those who lived through any kind of hardship, but that’s also what makes it so beautiful. It’s not easy going through the struggles of life, and even if ‘The Sound of Silence’ isn’t exactly a pick-me-up, it’s oddly comforting to know that there is someone else out there who has that same type of anxiety as well. Because if there’s one thing that folk-rock was best at, it was reminding everyone that they weren’t alone.
