The cover song Paul Simon treasured the most: “Something extremely powerful”
Every songwriter Paul Simon grew up listening to wasn’t in it for the fame and fortune.
Many people would have loved to be in the position The Beatles were in back in the day, but when looking at the songs that Simon was writing, he was far more interested in the craft of getting the perfect set of chords and the best lyrics that he could find whenever he made one of his masterpieces. But even with the respect from the greatest songwriters of his generation, there were a few songs that were bound to have a lot more sheen on them once they were out of Simon’s hands.
No disrespect meant to the man, but some of the greatest moments of his career have come from when he’s not singing all of his tunes. A lot of what makes Graceland a masterpiece is hearing the rest of the band playing off each other, and while Simon could call more of the shots when working in Simon and Garfunkel, it’s not like he would have been able to get anywhere without those soaring harmonies that Art Garfunkel was singing right beside him.
But it’s not like Simon was nothing without his bandmates either. He was the one making the skeleton of what the music was going to be, and even on those records when he had technicians like Steve Gadd and Tony Levin working with him, he was always dictating what the drums and the bass should sound like before he even laid his vocals down. This was about slowly sculpting a hit, but he had no say in what other people did with his songs.
Making a cover of someone else’s tune might be looked at as the greatest compliment, but it really depends on the kind of cover that you want to do. Simon already hated it when Frank Sinatra covered one of his tunes, but even when his heroes got their hands on his material, he wasn’t sitting there thinking that Bob Dylan’s version of ‘The Boxer’ was an absolute masterpiece or anything.
If you were going to get the approval from him, it had to be done right, and Johnny Cash was the best artist that could have ever recorded one of his tunes. The final years of the country legend’s career saw him doing a lot of cover songs, but in between the more eccentric tunes by Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails, ‘The Man In Black’ taking a stab at ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ is enough for anyone to break down in tears.
The song hasn’t exactly achieved the mythic status that Jimi Hendrix’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ has, but Simon was proud to have that voice singing one of his songs, saying, “It’s one of the treasured versions of it for me, as you could tell he wasn’t going to make another album. He was worried; he didn’t feel his voice was up to it. But for me, the fragility of his voice brings something extremely powerful.”
While the song does also benefit from having Fiona Apple’s beautiful harmony next to him, the lyrics mean a lot more coming out of Cash’s mouth at this point. There was a real possibility that this was going to be the final album that he ever saw come out, and even if there were a lot more farewell songs in his arsenal, a song about sticking with someone through the ups and downs makes a lot more sense coming from someone whose life has had its fair share of ups and downs.
Simon may have kicked himself for years about giving ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ to Garfunkel to sing, but sometimes it’s better to watch from the sidelines and see what a true professional can do with one of your songs. No one can sing a song like the person who wrote it, but whenever Cash sang a cover, most artists had to deal with the fact that their songs didn’t really belong to them anymore.
