The 2003 Old Friends tour — the final Simon and Garfunkel reunion — was, by the commercial measurements that the music industry uses to assess such things, an enormous success. The tour grossed over a hundred million dollars. It sold out arenas across North America and Europe. The audiences that filled those arenas were not simply nostalgia consumers — they were people for whom The Sound of Silence, Mrs. Robinson, The Boxer, and Bridge Over Troubled Water had been the soundtrack to specific moments of their lives, and who received the reunion with a gratitude that went beyond ordinary concert enthusiasm.
Behind the commercial success was a relationship between two men that had never fully recovered from the events of 1983, when Simon removed Garfunkel’s vocal contributions from what was supposed to be their joint album and released it as his own without adequate warning. Garfunkel joined the 2003 tour knowing this history and with the specific hope that sustained professional proximity — the daily work of rehearsal and performance — might accomplish what years of intermittent contact had not.
It did not. What ended the reunion this time was not a single dramatic betrayal but an accumulation — the specific quality of Paul Simon in a professional context, which is the quality of a man so completely focused on the work and on his own vision of what the work should be that the people around him can feel, even in successful performances, that they are contributors to someone else’s project rather than equal participants in a shared one.
Garfunkel has described this experience in the language of careful restraint — the language of a man who has decided that he will say what is true without saying everything that is painful. He has said that Simon’s way of working is Simon’s way of working, and that this way has certain qualities that are not comfortable to be around even when they produce good results. He has said the tour reminded him of why the partnership had been so creatively productive and also of why it had been, at various points, so personally difficult.
The letter Simon never sent — referenced obliquely in several interviews and in the accounts of people close to both men during the tour’s final legs — was apparently drafted during a period of particular tension in the final months of the tour. The people who know of its existence have described it as Simon’s attempt to address something in the relationship that had resisted verbal discussion, to put in writing what the two men had been unable to say directly in forty years of connection and disconnection.
He did not send it. The reasons he did not send it are not fully documented. What is known is that the 2003 tour ended and the two men did not subsequently arrange another significant collaboration. Garfunkel was diagnosed with a partial vocal cord paresis in 2010 that significantly affected his voice for several years — a loss that has had its own emotional dimension, the instrument through which he expressed himself professionally compromised in a way that no decision or disagreement had previously touched.
They have appeared at events together since. The photographs from those appearances show two men of great age standing together with the specific quality of people who share something too large and too complicated to be captured in a photograph — something that is neither friendship in the uncomplicated sense nor its absence, but something in between that has no clean name and that fifty years of music and conflict and reunion and silence has not resolved into anything simpler.