Credit: Far Out / Harry Chase, Los Angeles Times / Apple Corps

“Very similar”: The Beatles song Paul Simon compared to ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’

Mon 26 May 2025 17:30, UK

Sometimes it’s hard not to fall into the trap of writing to a formula, and you’d think that the most successful artists of all time are the ones who successfully manage to avoid doing this. However, there are always times when one song sounds like another, and it can either be down to malicious copycat behaviour or sheer unintentional coincidence. The Beatles must have done this at some point in their career, given the sheer volume of their output, but at the same time, you’d expect their songwriting abilities to offer something unique on every occasion.

It’s easy to write a song in 4/4; it’s referred to as ‘common time’ for a reason and is the most prevalent time signature in all of pop music. Similarly, there are patterns of chord sequences that work best in order to make a song catchy, and moving from the first chord in a key signature to the fifth, to the sixth to the fourth is something that’s just going to feel natural, no matter how many times it’s been done before.

Sure, you can get away with doing this sometimes, but on other occasions, it runs the risk of being too similar, and there are a lot of songs that feel like carbon copies of others that you might have heard. One might consider this to be a lack of creativity, others might consider it a coincidence, but when you hear a song like Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin”, you do have to wonder whether they were aware they were copying a formula that has been done to death.

However, if two songs are being written in secret around the same time as one another, then how on earth are you going to stop them from being similar? At the start of 1969, The Beatles had begun work on what would become their final album, Let It Be, and the while the title track wasn’t released for another year, it was considered the high point once it was released, and almost a perfect farewell for a band that everyone knew was about to break up.

The very same year, Paul Simon wrote ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ in the summer of 1969, and beat the Beatles to getting it released as the second single from what would be Simon & Garfunkel’s final album of the same name, predating ‘Let It Be’ by a couple of months. However, they’re eerily similar, and this wasn’t because Simon had had the privilege of hearing ‘Let It Be’ – it was simply an unusual coincidence.

In the May 1970 issue of Rolling Stone, Simon chose to address how the two songs seem to have an unusual amount of mutual qualities, and he was fascinated by how the two aligned. “That was interesting to me that we both wrote these songs that were very similar,” he confessed. “The first time I heard ‘Let It Be’, I couldn’t believe that [Paul McCartney] did that. They are very similar songs, certainly in instrumentation, sort of in their general musical feel, and lyrically. They’re sort of both hopeful songs and resting peaceful songs.”

However, it wasn’t just the vibe of the two songs that was similar, as McCartney had done something else that Simon had considered doing with the song. “[McCartney] must’ve written it about the same time that I wrote mine, and he gave it to Aretha Franklin, which is funny because when I first wrote ‘Bridge’, I said ‘boy, I bet Aretha could do a good job on this song’. It’s one of those weird things, and it happened simultaneously.”

McCartney had given the song in demo form to Franklin in March of 1969, and she even beat The Beatles to releasing ‘Let It Be’ as a single, despite it being their song. In fact, her release on January 15th, 1970, came out five days before the single release of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, meaning that the two songs would have been out and competing with one another at the very same time. There were no ill feelings between any of the parties involved, but it’s hard to deny that the similarities are spookily similar.