The album Art Garfunkel said was the “high point” of Simon and Garfunkel
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel never intended to go their separate ways.
That’s usually the case when frayed dynamics happen gradually and over a longer period of time. Eventually, it was over before they even knew it, and suddenly, a temporary hiatus ended up becoming a more permanent split. The silver lining, however, was that Simon could do things he couldn’t have in the duo, explore his own artistic voice without having to soundboard off anybody else.
According to Simon, the biggest change post-Simon and Garfunkel was being able to travel and discover new avenues of inspiration. “There was stuff I wanted to do anyway that Artie wouldn’t have done,” Simon told Time in 1990. “He wouldn’t have gone to Jamaica to do ‘Mother and Child Reunion’. I know that he wouldn’t have thought it was interesting.”
He also never would have been able to push himself into places others deemed risky or controversial, like Graceland, the record that initially epitomised sitting on the so-called wrong side of the political dichotomy, but which eventually came to be one of the most timeless masterpieces of an entire generation.
To an outsider, the start of pastures new may have seemed abrupt. In Simon’s view, however, the pair’s journey together was over before they even put out their last record, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Mainly because, as he recalls, they didn’t collaborate all that much on that record, usually working separately or singing solos on the songs, causing more of a strain between two minds that once cross-referenced everything they did together.
That’s also what made the eventual split feel harder to reckon with – that they’d once been an inseparable pair, a creative force with a shared vision, and no way of knowing, way back then, that they’d eventually struggle to see eye to eye. When Simon looks back, his time with his musical comrade is one of his favourite memories of his entire career.
Bridge Over Troubled Water might’ve broken more records than it patched up old spats, but for Garfunkel, it just doesn’t have the same warmth or charm that lingered after Sounds of Silence. The next one, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, is the record he still clings to when he wants to remember that, once upon a time, things between them were actually pretty rosy.
“My best memories go back to the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme days, when we were beginning to make albums more carefully, that we really liked,” Garfunkel told Time. “When we sat back and listened to the playback of that record, it was a high point in my career.”
Bolstered by the success of their debut single, ‘The Sound of Silence’, both Simon and Garfunkel had a renewed drive to explore the music they actually wanted to make and the kind that they didn’t.
With Garfunkel’s intricacy and Simon’s emotional core, the record eventually became one of the more timeless in their discography, pulling the threads of two distinctive themes – the social transformation of the mid-1960s and the folk singer-songwriter boom. Knowing how things turned out for the duo, it also becomes a bittersweet affair, one with modern themes wrapped in a blanket of deep-seated nostalgia.
