The failed Simon and Garfunkel album that Paul Simon hated making
Simon and Garfunkel is a duo often overlooked for their impact on the musical world around them. The folk music they made together and the connectivity within their vocal harmonies and performance resonated with listeners worldwide, to the extent that when they performed at Central Park, it was one of the biggest gigs that the city of New York had ever witnessed.
For a duo who relied so much on harmony, it’s interesting now to look back at how little they liked working together. Though there was some overlap in the kind of music they liked and what they wanted to make, which got them through the ‘60s, their differences massively outweighed the similarities.
This is clearly reflected in the solo albums that the two of them went on to make once the partnership had ended. Records like Fate For Breakfast and Breakaway are leaps and bounds away from Graceland and Paul Simon’s self-titled album. Paul Simon was never afraid to admit that he wasn’t keen on his musical counterparts’ solo outings either.
“I myself didn’t like them,” he said in an interview with Playboy, “I didn’t like the songs. I thought they weren’t really as bright as he was. He is much more complex than they were. He was singing songs that just didn’t reflect that. He was more interested in making a sound with his voice that was pleasing.”
The cracks in Simon and Garfunkel’s relationship and their differences in terms of the music they liked, made, and how they worked were showing long before the solo projects came along, though. By the end of their creative relationship, the two couldn’t stand working with one another, and the lost album, which never materialised, will forever be the final nail in the coffin, and it saw the end of one of the best songwriting partnerships ever.
When asked when the problems started to become clear to Paul Simon, he was relatively blunt with his answer, “From the start,” he said, “At first I thought, I really can’t do it. Those new songs are too much about my life – about Carrie – to have anybody else sing them. He said, ‘Look, these aren’t the events of my life, but I understand the emotions you’re dealing with. I understand what it is to be in love, to be in pain, to feel joy. I’m a singer. I’m able to interpret. That’s what I do’.”
While Simon was already hesitant about sharing the creative field when writing about such personal themes, Garfunkel’s subsequent desire to work in a way that kept Simon out of the loop meant that the project was doomed from the start. “Artie finally said, ‘Look, the way I want to do this record is you sing the song, make the track, and then leave me alone, and I’ll go into the studio and overlay my voice’.”
That didn’t sit right with Simon, who wanted to be able to contribute to all aspects of the music. The differences became too much, marking the duo’s official parting. That being said, the two went on to make contrasting but exciting solo albums, so maybe it was worth the loss of one LP for the gain of many more.
