“It was a step up”: The first great song Paul Simon ever wrote
Many artists have that one moment when the lightbulb turns on and they realise they have become something much bigger than the average songwriter. Whether it’s finding that perfect harmony for a song or turning in some grand musical exercise for five minutes, it’s clear that things aren’t going to be the same once they finish certain tunes. And while Paul Simon has reinvented himself a few times, he didn’t always understand what songs were a watershed moment and which were destined for the bargain bins.
Because when someone’s starting in the music industry, it’s impossible to figure out what the audience wants out of them. There’s hardly any reason for people to have that musical superpower from the beginning, and judging by the fact that Simon and Garfunkel were ignored for the first chunk of their career, it’s not like they understood how to fit into the traditional world of rock and roll.
Then again, it’s no surprise looking at the rest of the charts. Wednesday Morning 3am is a fairly solid record with some fantastic tunes, but since everyone else was gravitating towards the earthshattering music that everyone from Bob Dylan to The Beatles was putting out, asking someone to care about two New York singers strumming away on tunes like ‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’ felt like the exact opposite of cool.
But when someone remixed ‘The Sound of Silence’ against Simon’s wishes, the duo had a new lease of life. The song fit nicely next to Dylan’s electric songs and The Byrds’ material on the radio, but when they got everyone’s attention, everyone zeroed in on the dark lyrics that Simon had to air out on this tune.
Considering he was only in his early 20s when he made the tune, Simon sounds like a man twice his age trying to impart wisdom on the coming generation. The aftermath of the Kennedy assassination was still heavy in people’s minds, so hearing him give a voice to that kind of emotional pain wasn’t exactly commonplace at the time, but when Simon first started woodshedding the tune, he had to be convinced by his brother that the tune had the kind of staying power he was looking for.
He already knew that the song was good, but looking back, Simon felt that it far outweighed anything else he had written, saying, “Everything I’d written before that was way below it in quality. It was a step up. It was probably one of those things when you’re in some kind of serotonin/dopamine flow, and it just comes out. But I was too young to know that those things happened. So I just took it as, ‘That’s a good one, I could close my act with this one.’”
Considering how relevant the tune is to this day, it’s hard not to think that Simon was looking into the future in some respects. Pain and strife aren’t exclusive to only one generation, and from all the unrest that’s still going on in the world, Simon’s plea for things to get better is almost like its own prayer that anyone could sing at times when it feels like the world is going to burn for eternity.
‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ may be a more layered production, and there are many more adventurous moments going on during his solo career on tracks like ‘Graceland’, but ‘The Sound of Silence’ has the perfect balance of naivete and craftsmanship behind it. And if Dylan had bothered to drop the sarcastic tone of voice whenever he sang, he could have easily added this to his setlist in his prime.
