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Simon & Garfunkel VibeZ

Two boys from Queens who harmonised like brothers and wrote like short-story authors. Thirteen tracks that have not aged a day in sixty years.

The most literary songwriting in American pop

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel met in a school production of Alice in Wonderland in Forest Hills, Queens, and had a minor hit as teenagers under the name Tom & Jerry. Their real career began when "The Sound of Silence" — originally a quiet acoustic track that went nowhere — was overdubbed with electric instruments by a producer without their involvement and went to number one in 1965.

What followed was five years of extraordinary output. Simon wrote the songs; Garfunkel's high, pure tenor gave them a quality of consolation that Simon's own voice never quite had. The combination produced music that was commercially enormous and genuinely literary — observational, ironic, frequently sad, and unusually interested in loneliness as a subject.

What to listen for

"The Boxer" is the technical marvel: recorded across multiple studios over a hundred hours, with that thunderous snare-crack achieved in an elevator shaft. It also contains one of the most quietly devastating final verses in popular song.

"Bridge Over Troubled Water" is Garfunkel's monument — Simon wrote it and gave it away, and reportedly regretted doing so.

"The Dangling Conversation" and "A Most Peculiar Man" are the deep cuts that show what the writing was actually doing — both are studies in isolation, delivered without a shred of melodrama. "Old Friends" and the "Bookends Theme" are the album sequence that ties it together.

"Scarborough Fair / Canticle" layers an English folk ballad against an anti-war lyric — two songs sung simultaneously, and the effect is unsettling in a way that its gentle surface disguises.

"Mrs. Robinson," "Cecilia," "Homeward Bound" and "Feelin' Groovy" are the ones everybody knows, and they hold up.

Go deeper

Bookends (1968) is the album to hear whole — a genuine concept record about ageing, made by two men in their twenties. Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970) was the last, and the duo split immediately after.

Paul Simon's solo career is arguably richer: Graceland (1986) is the essential one, and its collaboration with South African musicians — including Ladysmith Black Mambazo — remains both one of the great pop records and a genuinely contested piece of cultural history, given it was made during the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa. Worth engaging with both facts.

For the tradition: The Everly Brothers are the direct model for the harmony, and Fleet Foxes the clearest modern inheritors.

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