‘The Only Living Boy in New York’: Simon and Garfunkel’s bittersweet farewell ballad
There’s a moment when you know it’s all over. It’s a still, sombre, yet bittersweet moment right before the carnage of the actual end, where all you have is a mix of tender hope and hopeless resolve. The world seems to keep moving around you as you brace for a period of intense change or watch as something slips out of your gasp. But for now, all there is to do is keep moving, keep plodding along and keep existing in this lonely moment. ‘The Only Living Boy In New York’ exists there, too, as Paul Simon’s heart-aching farewell ballad to Simon and Garfunkel.
By the time Simon and Garfunkel’s fifth album, Bridge over Troubled Water, was being created, they knew it would be the end. The two members were growing in different directions, pulling them further and further apart and tearing the band at the seams with it. With each new opportunity, whether it was an individual thing for one of the members or another step up in the band’s success, it only seemed to break their relationship apart even more. It couldn’t go on, and by the end of the 1960s, they knew it.
But just because something has to end, that doesn’t make it easy. Even when a relationship has soured to the point of rotting, the decision to part ways is always a difficult one, tinged with desperate hopes of making it work, holding hands with the mourning fact that it can’t. Their final album feels like Simon’s attempt to process the period.
Even though he’d always been the band’s principal songwriter, Garfunkel had always been there to riff ideas off or help with arrangements. The pair had grown up together, learning music side by side. They were only 12 when they first started their musical duo and only 15 when they signed their first deal. It had always been the two of them, two friends so close that they called themselves Tom and Jerry in reference to the famous cartoon double act. It was a connection so tight that it went beyond just being best friends; they were family.
That’s what made their split so painful. They strived together to get to the top, and then when they got there, neither expected it would be their friendship that would come crumbling down, bringing the band into rubble with it. Across their final album, Simon navigates feelings of loss, loyalty and endurance with a series of big ballads and folk-rock hits. But on ‘Only Living Boy In New York’, he strips it back to a simple letter to his distant friend, perfectly capturing the bittersweet moment before their final split.
“Tom, get your plane right on time / I know your part’ll go fine,” he begins, referring to Garfunkel with his old nickname as if it were an attempt to remind him of the good old days. While Simon was writing the track, his bandmate was flying off to Mexico to be in a film. The song began with an offering of friendship reassurance, a reminder that he’d be okay and that Simon still believed in him. With this context and the knowledge that the two friends would barely talk for years after this album, the song is heartbreaking. It feels like a hand reaching out, offering an olive branch of friendship or an attempt to get them back on better ground.
But when left alone in the city to make the album without his closest collaborator, Simon casts himself as “the only living boy in New York” as a sad comment on his loneliness. It’s a beautiful but devastating one-liner that manages to capture so much emotion. It embodies not only Simon’s feelings of isolation from his friend but also the feeling of being utterly misunderstood by everyone else. It seems to say that without his old friend, Simon is alone, unable to participate in the world around him and merely coasting along in this period of sad confusion where he knew his band and his friendship were dying, but for now, he had to just keep living, writing and waiting for the moment to give in.
The last verse says it all in a simple yet poetic call out to Garfunkel, asking for this stalemate to end. “Tom, get your plane right on time / I know that you’ve been eager to fly now,” he sings, referring to the fact that it was clear that his bandmate was ready to fly the nest of their band and go off towards other opportunities. “Hey, let your honesty shine, shine, shine now,” he says in a lyric that says to his friend, ‘Just talk to me, tell me the truth’ as he wandered New York, knowing it was over but waiting for the end.
