“The metaphor got ruined”: The lyrics Paul Simon said ruined ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’
It’s well known that Paul Simon is a songwriter who obsesses over the minor details of songs. While he’s certainly cemented in the pantheon of songwriting greats, his process differs from his more natural counterparts.
In George Martin’s 1983 book, Making Music, Simon explained the methodology that sits behind one of music’s finest back-catalogues: “I work with my guitar and a legal pad and use about 50 pages to develop a song,” Simon wrote. “I get going fairly early in the morning, because my mind is sharp, and start by dating the pad and putting down personal comments, such as how I am feeling that day, so that it becomes a diary of sorts. Slowly, a song will begin to emerge although sometimes it will stagger along, day after day, making no progress at all. The first page might have all sorts of lines that will never be used, but as I turn the pages, a little thought might come forward and suggest potential for development.”
His similarly iconic namesake, Paul McCartney once told Rolling Stone, “Paul Simon works his music much more than I do, with a first draft, a second draft, third draft. I do that as well, but not as much as he does. It’s different kinds of music.”
In Simon’s defence, it’s a fairly diligent process that has yielded some incredible results. In fact, given the rich tapestry of images, emotions and experiences Simon has managed to cram into his discography may simply not have existed without his trusty legal pad and 50 pages of scribbling.
One track in particular, stands out from the rest in the discourse of Simon’s greatness. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ from Simon and Garfunkel’s album of the same name is an iconic folk tale that alludes to the personal problems of Paul Simon and his professional partner Art Garfunkel.
“The song, as I originally wrote it, was just the first two verses. I just wanted it to be Artie, singing it with the piano accompaniment” Simon told The New York Times in 1972.
He continued, “But when we finished those two verses, it felt as though you wanted to hear more. So we decided to do a third verse. But I didn’t have any words, and I’d already said what I wanted the song to say in the first two verses. But now I had to come up with this third verse, which sounds to me like the Righteous Brothers or something like that. I mean, it fits in a record sense – it makes the record happen – but, as a song, the metaphor got ruined”.
While the song spoke to more direct storylines in Simon’s life, it’s grown to become a more universal anthem, used regularly as a symbol of defiance in the face of adversity. This is an attribute of the song that is possibly strengthened by the third verse’s more arbitrary nature and while to Simon it’s a reminder of a dampened metaphor, to the rest of the world, it’s a finishing verse that compounded the strength of the song’s sentiment and sent it on it’s way to worldwide acclaim.
