Paul Simon is one of the greatest lyricists the twentieth century produced. That is not a controversial statement. It is simply what the evidence shows — album after album of writing so precise, so emotionally intelligent, so perfectly calibrated between the specific and the universal, that generations of listeners have heard his songs and felt personally seen. He writes the way a surgeon operates: with total control, with complete intention, with nothing left to accident.
Which means that everything in his songs is there on purpose.
Art Garfunkel has spent decades coming to terms with this. With the understanding that the person standing next to him for the most important years of his musical life was, at the same time, writing down exactly what he thought of that relationship and putting it in front of millions of people. That the most honest conversations Paul Simon had about their friendship were not conversations at all. They were songs. And Garfunkel, who sang them in his extraordinary voice without always fully hearing them, would only understand what had been said after the friendship had fractured.
1. “The Sound of Silence” is the beginning of the document. Written when they were still teenagers, it describes a profound loneliness — a person surrounded by people who cannot communicate, who speak without listening, who connect without touching. Garfunkel sang it as a beautiful song about modern alienation. Simon was also writing about the specific loneliness of being in a room with someone who does not see you clearly.
2. “America” — one of the most beloved road songs ever written — is on the surface a story about two young people searching for something they cannot name. But listen to the distance in it. Listen to the way the two travelers in the song exist beside each other rather than with each other. One is asleep. One is looking out the window, counting cars, feeling an emptiness he cannot explain to the person next to him. Simon wrote that distance from the inside.
3. “The Boxer” contains a line that Garfunkel has said, in later years, he finds almost impossible to sing when he thinks about what it means: “I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told.” Simon wrote those words. Simon, who spent years feeling invisible inside a partnership where Garfunkel’s voice received the attention and the praise and the attention of audiences while Simon’s writing — the thing that made all of it possible — went largely unremarked upon by the public.
4. “El Condor Pasa” with its famous opening declaration — “I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail” — is a song about the desire for freedom, for flight, for escape from something constraining. Simon chose that song deliberately for that album at that moment. The timing was not accidental.
5. “Old Friends” — perhaps the most devastating of all — imagines two old men sitting together on a park bench, sharing a silence that has more history in it than words could carry. Simon wrote this while they were still young. He was already imagining the ending. Already writing the elegy for something that hadn’t finished dying yet.
Garfunkel has said that he sometimes goes back and listens to their records and hears things he didn’t hear before. That the songs sound different when you know the story that came after them. When you understand that your partner was talking to you the whole time through the music and you were too busy singing to listen.
That might be the saddest thing about Simon and Garfunkel. Not the split. Not the rivalry. But the years of songs that were also letters — and the letter writer who never got a reply.