Paul Simon

Deep Dive

Overview

Paul Simon stands as one of rock music’s most durable and intellectually restless songwriters. Born in 1941, he first came to international prominence as half of Simon & Garfunkel, the duo whose intricate vocal harmonies and literate folk-rock arrangements became the sound of 1960s American idealism and angst. After the partnership dissolved, Simon pursued a solo career spanning five decades and counting—one marked by consistent reinvention, genre exploration, and a refusal to calcify around past success. His influence stretches across folk rock, soft rock, world music, and contemporary singer-songwriter traditions.

Formation Story

Paul Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Queens, New York, in a musical household. He met Art Garfunkel in elementary school in 1953, and the two began singing together as teenagers. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, they were performing in local New York ensembles, eventually adopting the name Tom & Jerry before rebranding as Simon & Garfunkel. The pair emerged from the Greenwich Village folk scene at a moment when acoustic guitar-driven songwriting and vocal harmony were becoming central to rock music’s evolution. Simon’s gift for intricate melodic construction and observational, often melancholic lyrics complemented Garfunkel’s soaring tenor voice, creating a signature sound that would define an era.

Breakthrough Moment

Simon & Garfunkel achieved their first major breakthrough with “The Sound of Silence” in 1965, a studio-produced reimagining of an earlier acoustic track that reached the top of the charts. The song’s arrangement—featuring electric instrumentation layered beneath Garfunkel’s vocal—became a template for the folk-rock hybrid that would dominate the mid-to-late 1960s. Subsequent albums and singles cemented their status: “Mrs. Robinson” and “America” from 1968 captured the anxieties and aspirations of American youth during a turbulent cultural moment. Their 1970 album Bridge over Troubled Water, featuring the title track’s orchestral grandeur, became one of the best-selling albums of all time. The duo’s commercial and critical success was nearly unparalleled among rock acts of their generation.

Peak Era

While Simon & Garfunkel’s commercial dominance peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Simon’s solo career achieved its own peaks across multiple decades. His first solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, appeared in 1965 while he was still performing with Garfunkel. After the duo’s final studio album in 1970, Simon released Paul Simon in 1972 and There Goes Rhymin’ Simon in 1973, establishing himself as a substantial artist in his own right. Still Crazy After All These Years (1975) deepened his reputation for introspection and sophisticated pop production. In the mid-1980s, the album Graceland (1986) marked a seismic creative and commercial moment: collaborating with South African musicians and producer Quincy Jones, Simon fused American songwriting with African rhythmic and harmonic traditions, reaching audiences across generational and geographical lines and inaugurating a new phase of his career rooted in world music exploration.

Musical Style

Simon’s songwriting is rooted in folk-rock sensibilities—acoustic guitar, clear lyrical narratives, and vocal harmony—but his solo work reveals constant stylistic migration. His early solo work maintained the folk-pop intimacy of the Simon & Garfunkel years while introducing more complex production and diverse instrumental textures. By the 1980s and beyond, his music incorporated Latin percussion, Brazilian rhythms (The Rhythm of the Saints, 1990), theatrical arrangements (Songs From The Capeman, 1997), and subtle electronic elements. His vocal approach—conversational, conversely pitched, emotionally reserved rather than bombastic—remained consistent across decades. Lyrically, Simon gravitates toward observational realism, often exploring themes of aging, mortality, urban life, and cultural displacement. His melodies tend toward the sophisticated: unconventional structures, jazz-inflected chord progressions, and syncopated rhythmic patterns mark his best work.

Major Albums

Still Crazy After All These Years (1975)

A landmark exploration of middle age, mortality, and romantic disappointment, this album solidified Simon’s post-Garfunkel solo identity while maintaining pop accessibility and production sophistication.

Graceland (1986)

A transformative collaboration with South African musicians and Quincy Jones, this album broke conventional boundaries between American pop and world music, introducing African rhythmic and harmonic traditions to mainstream audiences and reigniting Simon’s creative ambitions.

The Rhythm of the Saints (1990)

Following Graceland’s blueprint, Simon again traveled abroad—this time to Brazil—to absorb and incorporate local musical traditions, creating an album dominated by complex percussion and Brazilian cultural perspectives.

Songs From The Capeman (1997)

A theatrical songwriting project addressing identity, crime, and redemption in New York City, this album marked Simon’s most ambitious narrative work and demonstrated his continued willingness to pursue unconventional projects.

Surprise (2006)

Produced by Brian Eno, this late-career work fused subtle electronic textures, intricate layering, and Simon’s signature observational lyricism, proving his creative relevance in the 21st century.

Stranger to Stranger (2016)

Recorded in his seventies, this album showcased Simon’s continued facility with melody and lyrical precision while embracing contemporary production techniques and the wisdom of age.

Signature Songs

• “The Sound of Silence” (1965) — The duo’s breakthrough hit and definitive folk-rock statement, built on the tension between acoustic simplicity and studio sophistication.
• “Mrs. Robinson” (1968) — A commentary on American post-war innocence and disillusionment, featuring one of pop music’s most memorable chorus hooks.
• “America” (1968) — A road-song narrative capturing restlessness and yearning during the turbulent 1960s.
• “The Boxer” (1969) — An elegiac, autobiographically inflected narrative of struggle and survival, featuring intricate harmony and orchestral arrangement.
• “Bridge over Troubled Water” (1970) — A gospel-influenced ballad of consolation and friendship, reaching the pinnacle of 1960s studio arrangement ambition.
• “Graceland” (1986) — The title track merging American and African musical vocabularies, serving as a mission statement for the album’s cultural synthesis.
• “You Can Call Me Al” (1986) — A playful, propulsive exploration of identity and reinvention, featuring prominent bass instrumentation and infectious rhythm.

Influence on Rock

Simon’s influence on rock music operates across multiple dimensions. As a songwriter, he elevated the folk-rock idiom’s lyrical intelligence and melodic sophistication during the 1960s, competing with contemporaries like Bob Dylan by emphasizing clarity, narrative specificity, and harmonic complexity rather than mystique. His solo work demonstrated that a rock artist could sustain a career across five decades while pursuing artistic reinvention; he proved that world music and cross-cultural collaboration could be a legitimate avenue for established Western rock musicians, opening pathways later traveled by David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, and others. His production sensibility—detailed, layered, orchestrally ambitious—influenced soft-rock and adult-contemporary songwriting traditions. Equally, his example of intellectual restraint and skepticism toward his own mythology set a model for singer-songwriters seeking to evolve without caricature.

Legacy

Paul Simon’s legacy rests on four pillars: the Simon & Garfunkel catalog remains canonical in American rock, continuing to reach audiences through streaming, film soundtracks, and cultural memory; his solo albums have achieved enduring critical reassessment, with Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints recognized as pioneering world-music collaborations; his songwriting influence persists across generations of folk and pop musicians; and his career longevity—continuing to record and perform into his eighties—embodies the possibility of sustained artistic growth in rock music. His albums remain widely available on streaming platforms and through Columbia and Warner Bros. Records, ensuring his music reaches each new generation of listeners seeking intelligent, sophisticated songwriting rooted in folk-rock traditions yet unafraid of global musical synthesis.

Fun Facts

• Simon began his professional recording career in the late 1950s under the stage name Jerry Landis before forming the duo that would become Simon & Garfunkel.
• Graceland was recorded in part without the full knowledge or cooperation of the South African government, undertaken during the final years of apartheid, making the album a subtle political statement on cultural exchange across racial and national boundaries.
• Simon’s 1997 album Songs From The Capeman was based on the true crime story of a young Puerto Rican man in 1950s New York City, demonstrating his commitment to narrative songwriting on a theatrical scale.
• He has continued recording prolifically into the 2020s, with Seven Psalms arriving in 2023, more than six decades after his first professional recordings.