The first Paul Simon album that had no bad songs: “I started to become a better writer”
Paul Simon didn’t simply wake up one morning and decide to become one of the greatest songwriters of his generation.
Anyone who has that strong a track record has to have at least 100 songs in the backlog before they come out with at least one good one, and Simon was no exception when he first began cutting his teeth with Art Garfunkel. Once they moved past the pseudonyms Tom and Jerry, though, ‘The Sound of Silence’ was their ticket into making the greatest songwriter tunes of their generation.
If you think about it, ‘The Sound of Silence’ is one of the few songs that can’t possibly be improved at all. There are definitely protest songs from around that time that can feel a little bit dated, but whether you’re listening to the tender acoustic version or the rock band arrangement, every word still rings true to this day about dreaming of a better world but being unsure if it will ever come. Then again, that doesn’t mean that every single record had to be an absolute smash when they walked into the studio.
After all, Sounds of Silence is one of the most tuneful cash grab albums to have ever come out of the 1960s. It’s no secret that Simon was writing fantastic tunes, but when the duo started gaining traction, making another album of new material and slapping the new version of ‘The Sound of Silence’ on top of it made a lot more sense from a business standpoint than an artistic standpoint. So when they made Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, they at least had a better idea of what they wanted to make.
That’s not to say that every single one of the tunes was fantastic then, either. There’s definitely a lot of growth happening on their rendition of ‘Scarborough Fair/Canticle’ and the Bob Dylan send-up ‘A Simple Desultory Philippic’ is pretty fun, but Simon would be the first to say that ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song’ was an abomination, even if it does have a fantastic hook behind it. They needed to expand a little more, and Bookends was where he always hoped the band would end up.
Which is strange to say about an album that feels like two half-albums smushed together. The first side has a great sense of flow behind it, but since they were working on The Graduate around the same time, it’s strange seeing them go from a song like ‘America’ to tunes like ‘Mrs Robinson’ and ‘Hazy Shade of Winter’ on the flipside. The momentum was definitely weird, but for Simon, this was the first time where he felt like all of the songs finally met his musical standards.
And from that point forward, Simon felt like all of his albums had the best songs that anyone could have asked for, saying, “What happened was I started to become a better writer. From Bookends on there aren’t too many really bad songs. There’s a whole bunch of songs that are forgettable, but there aren’t too many real stinkers.” No one’s track record is that perfect, but you can see what Simon is getting at when you look at his solo trajectory.
Sure, not everything had to be as successful as Graceland to be a great album, but when there are some sore spots in the mix, it’s often because of something happening in the process. Simon’s songwriting methods weren’t going to fail him, but whether it was the production or the way that the rest of the band was working, some of the questionable moments of his career tend to come from great songs that simply aren’t given the time of day that they should.
There was certainly room for improvement after Bookends, but that album captures something much bigger than a bunch of great songs. This was the sound of Simon finally knowing what made his music work, and he was going to spend the rest of his life trying to chase after that high bar for songwriting.
