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Paul Simon: Simon And Garfunkel
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Paul Simon is among the most erudite and daring songsmiths in popular music. After the breakup of Simon and Garfunkel in 1970, Simon embarked on a fruitful solo career that’s been notable for lyrical acuity, impeccable musicianship and stylistic daring. While Simon and Garfunkel worked largely (but not exclusively) in the folk idiom, Simon the solo artist has roamed wherever his muse has taken him - and that has literally meant around the world. His is not so much a conventional career in music as an odyssey of discovery using “intuitive flashes, synaptic leaps and shorthand logic” (in Simon’s own words) to help him on his way.
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It has been 49 years since Paul Simon sat in his childhood bedroom in Queens in New York City and wrote his first hit song, Hey, Schoolgirl. A half-century is a fair chunk of time, and Simon, 64, has packed it with all sorts of creative meandering. There was Simon and Garfunkel—merely the greatest folk duo of all time—followed by a stab at acting in Annie Hall, a dive into filmmaking with One Trick Pony and a flirtation with Tin Pan Alley in the criminally overlooked The Capeman.
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Throughout his solo career, Paul Simon has loaned his unique songwriting voice to a host of different global and ethnic musical styles. Simon's cross-cultural pollinations work so well because he makes sure that his musical interests match his personal vision. Immediately after he split with Garfunkel he recorded with Stephane Grapelli, the Dixie Hummingbirds and Los Incas, while his late '70s and early '80s work found him searching the darker emotional sides of that era, notorious for good cocaine and bad wine. 1986's Graceland was a joyous about-face, introducing North America to modern South African popular music. Since that time Simon has continued to explore -- one of his last efforts was writing for the Broadway stage. Yet no matter where he goes or what he does, his music beats with the same Folk-Pop heart that resided in Simon and Garfunkel.
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Simon had gone to England after the initial failure of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., pursuing a solo career (including collaborations with Bruce Woodley of The Seekers) and releasing the album The Paul Simon Song Book in the UK in 1965. But he returned to the USA to reunite with Garfunkel after "The Sound of Silence" had started to enjoy commercial success. Together they recorded several influential albums, including 1966's Sounds of Silence, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Bookends in 1968 and Bridge Over Troubled Water (1969). Simon and Garfunkel ... contributed extensively to the soundtrack of the 1967 Mike Nichols film The Graduate (starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft). While writing Mrs. Robinson, Simon originally toyed with the title Mrs. Roosevelt. When Garfunkel reported this indecision over the song's name to the director, Nichols replied, "Don't be ridiculous!
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After the 1970 breakup of Simon and Garfunkel [see entry], Paul Simon went on confirm his stature as a first-rate songwriter and performer. His terse, exquisitely crafted songs have drawn on early rock & roll (particularly doo-wop), reggae, salsa, jazz, gospel, blues, New Orleans, and African and South American music, in some cases presaging the conscious blending of world music into mainstream pop by over a decade. In an unassuming, distinctive tenor, Paul Simon has sung of matters personal and universal with attitudes ranging from the whimsical to the reverent. Simon stands apart from most folk-based singer/songwriters of his generation in that he has created a wide-ranging body of work in which the purely musical vocabulary - of style, instrumentation, and sounds - is as evocative and as expressive as his lyrics.
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Paul Frederic Simon is considered to be one of the finest American songwriters of the century. He was the primary songwriter in the duo Simon and Garfunkel, which recorded several influential albums, including 1966's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, and Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970). They ... contributed extensively to the soundtrack of the 1967 film The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. The film included several of the duo's songs, all of which could be found on earlier releases (except for the now famous Mrs. Robinson).
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Simon And Garfunkel