(Credits: YouTube Still)
Tue 14 April 2026 20:00, UK
At this point, Paul Simon almost feels more like an orchestrator of songs than an actual songwriter.
There are plenty of times where he has made the greatest tunes of the 1960s on his own, but when listening to how he constructed some of the best material of his solo career, it was always about trying to get the best out of whatever musician he was working with that would give him a sound that he hadn’t heard before. But while Simon felt strongly about every musician who was kind enough to work with him, he was a little bit picky about what songs he was reserving for himself.
Because like any great songwriter, Simon was looking to get his tunes out into the world by any means necessary. Tom and Jerry was already a bit of an experiment between him and Art Garfunkel, and by the time their first record came out as a duo, the fact that the whole flopped led to Simon thinking about making a solo career out of his tunes rather than going back to his old band.
But when he was first road-testing tunes for other singers to sing, there was something magical about the way that ‘The Sound of Silence’ rolled off his fingers. All it took was one dark bathroom with decent acoustics for him to find the sound that he wanted, and when listening to both he and Garfunkel harmonising on the song, the tune captured a certain sense of loneliness that everyone felt about the state of the world following the assassination of John F Kennedy.
Most people would have realised that they had a hit on their hands, and Simon wasn’t about to let anything slip away when he first presented the tune to his higher-ups. This was the song that had the magic behind it, but Simon felt that the label’s initial reaction to the song was far from what he had wanted to hear.
The original plan was for Simon to present the song to another singer and have them cut it, but he was determined not to let his song get away from him, saying, “I made this demo with the help of Jim McGuinn, who later changed his name to Roger McGuinn. I brought this demo to [producer] Tom Wilson, and he said, ‘I’d like to record that song with The Pilgrims’. And I said, ‘I actually have this friend of mine. We sing together. Would you like to hear that version?’. We came up and we sang, and he said, ‘I’m going to see if Columbia would sign you’. We were beside ourselves.”
But even if the duo had a few hopeful signs, that didn’t mean they were out of the woods yet. This was the same record that sank without a trace, and even though the tune was untouched and already one of the greatest songs that Simon had ever written, Wilson thought that everything needed that little extra punch for everything to sound perfect, and by getting a folk-rock band to play, everything fell into place.
Simon didn’t ever want this version to be heard, but when you look at where they were at the time, it wasn’t the worst decision in the world. Bob Dylan had already started becoming the biggest artist in the world when he went electric, and by getting that tiny bit of electric guitar into the mix, people could hear the urgency in the lyric a lot better than two people singing with an acoustic guitar.
Compromising isn’t usually something that any artist likes to hear when making their classics, but when you look at how history played out, this is one of the few times where the commercial compromise is an improvement. No one could have imagined that this would have been one of the biggest songs of the 1960s at the time, but even with the fancy window dressing, Simon’s lyrics were going to shine through as long as he and Garfunkel were the beating heart behind them.
