The three Simon and Garfunkel songs Paul Simon hates: “Paul was horrified”
When you are as prolific and gifted a songwriter as Paul Simon, it is something of an inevitability that you’ll have a few dud tracks in your roster. The New Jersey-born songwriter first rose to fame as one half of the 1960s duo Simon and Garfunkel, and subsequently embarked upon an incredibly successful solo career that is still going strong to this day. His music is adored worldwide but, as is often the case with artists, Simon is his own biggest critic.
Simon and Garfunkel were a defining group of the 1960s, their pop folk soundtracking many of the era’s most iconic moments. Despite their intense and enduring success, as well as the undeniable brilliance of works like Bridge Over Troubled Water or the soundtrack for Dustin Hoffman’s The Graduate, Paul Simon clearly has a complicated relationship with his early material. Over the years, the songwriter has openly discussed his disliking of certain Simon and Garfunkel tracks, including some of their most popular songs.
The vast likelihood is that Simon’s unease at some of the material he had created with Art Garfunkel is a result of the pair’s tentative relationship. Given the intense rise to fame that the pair experienced during the 1960s, it was almost inevitable that the relationship between the two musicians would become somewhat strained. So much so that, by 1970, there was no way to continue with the group. The duo parted ways, launching respective solo careers, and rarely speaking to each other.
In the many years that followed 1970, Simon and Garfunkel have reunited multiple times, most notably for a concert in New York’s Central Park in 1981. However, these sporadic reunions did little to alleviate Simon’s resentment over certain tracks the pair had recorded back in the 1960s. So, with that in mind, let us recount three tracks from the celebrated discography of Simon and Garfunkel that Paul Simon openly hated.
The three Simon and Garfunkel songs Paul Simon hates
’59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)’
You would be forgiven for thinking that a collaboration between the folk of Simon and Garfunkel and the legendary jazz stylings of the Dave Brubeck Quartet would garner groundbreaking results. In actuality, the product of the collaboration was the folk-pop track ‘59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)’, featured on the pair’s 1966 record Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. There is nothing particularly offensive about the song, but it seems to lack the depth or profound quality that Simon so often searches for.
During an appearance at Tufts University back in 1966, the songwriter explained the writing of the song, saying, “I was getting into a good mood, and I remember coming home in the morning about 6 o’clock over the 59th Street Bridge in New York, and it was such a groovy day really, a good one,” yet the song which resulted from that groovy day was largely disappointing. Simon disliked the track so much that he refused to perform it live until 2018 and, even then, he prefaced the performance by saying, “I’m going to penalise myself. I’m going to sing one of my songs that I loathe”.
‘Sound of Silence (Electric Version)’
Paul Simon owes a lot to the success of ‘The Sound of Silence’, as it was the track that first secured the pair with a record deal with Columbia. In hindsight, Simon’s later work definitely eclipsed the song, with the writer saying ”It’s a young lyric, but not bad for a 21-year-old”. However, it was the original acoustic version that got the duo a record deal, not the electric version that was released later on.
The electric mix was concocted by producer Tom Wilson, who saw the chart potential after The Byrds found fame with an electric cover of Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Reportedly, Wilson didn’t think to consult the duo about his decision, though it did earn them a number one single upon its release. Simon’s colleague and friend Al Stewart later recalled in Paul Simon: A Life “Paul was horrified when he first heard it … [when the] rhythm section slowed down at one point so that Paul and Artie’s voices could catch up.”
‘Homeward Bound’
Some of Simon’s most hated tracks come not as a result of poor songwriting or unwanted electronic remixes but of the context in which he first wrote the songs. Their 1966 single ‘Homeward Bound’ provided the duo with one of their most popular and commercially successful tracks, breaking into the top ten in both the UK and US. Nevertheless, Simon grew to resent the song in the years that followed the band’s breakup. During a 1984 interview with Playboy, around the same time as the pair reunited, Simon spoke of his disliking of the track.
“I was thinking, I hate ‘Homeward Bound’,” he recalled, “and then I thought, why do I hate it? I said ‘Oh, I hate the words.’ So I went over them. And then I remembered where I wrote it. I was in Liverpool, actually in a railway station. I’d just played a little folk job. The job of a folk singer in those days was to be Bob Dylan,” he explained, “You had to be a poet. That’s what they wanted. And I thought that was a drag”.
Despite his disgust at having to emanate the songwriting style of Bob Dylan, the songwriter admits, “Then I thought, well, that’s not a bad song at all for a 22-year-old kid. It’s actually quite touching now that I see it”. However, it was the very fact that he had to perform the song as with Art Garfunkel that was the cause of annoyance, “Then I said,” he revealed, “‘I know! It’s that I don’t want to be singing that song as Simon and Garfunkel”.
