(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Fri 24 October 2025 18:00, UK
There’s no point in Paul Simon trying to make songs that everyone was going to love.
He could only quote his own heart when making his greatest compositions, and even if they resonated with millions around the world when making his solo masterpieces or Simon and Garfunkel classics, that was only a happy by-product of everything. He was bound to have a few haters along the way, but Simon knew that only the chosen few legends were the ones immune to any kind of criticism.
Then again, Simon’s musical heroes were far more eclectic than the average rock and roll players. He had already been immersed in the folk scene before Simon and Garfunkel came into his mind, but when he started working with other musicians in his solo career, there were a few people from the jazz world who helped show him what could be done if he expanded his sound a little bit.
But before he even broke away from his singing partner, he was always daring to dream bigger than typical goddamn rock and roll songs. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ was already based on a work by Bach, so it wasn’t like Simon was trying to write an answer to a Chuck Berry song. When someone gets hit with rock and roll as a kid, though, there’s no way to forget how that music made you feel.
Sure, soul artists like Sam Cooke and Ray Charles defy explanation because of how genius their works are, but when listening to the Everly Brothers, Simon knew that sounded feasible. The way those harmonies stacked on top of each other wasn’t going to be that hard for him and Garfunkel to do, and when they started making their own masterpieces, tunes like ‘Scarborough Fair/Canticle’ took what his heroes started out with and pushed it even further.
If anyone was going to have an effect on Simon, though, it was bound to be Elvis Presley. Simon already went through the trouble of naming an entire album after Graceland, but when he first visited the piece of rock and roll history, he wasn’t too thrilled with what he saw. The whole thing looked gaudy, but when he was shown ‘The King’s final resting place, it was enough to make him shed a tear.
When talking about the song of the same name, Simon remembered the feeling of being shellshocked when looking out on Presley’s grave, saying, “It said, ‘Elvis Presley, whose music touched millions of people all around the world’, and I just started to cry. I thought, ‘It’s really true. This guy was loved by everybody.’” And while the actual song sounds nothing like the songs Presley was singing in his prime, it does a better job of capturing that feeling of wonder Simon had.
The tune itself is more about a father-son relationship and how they are trying to put themselves back together, but it’s easy to picture Presley’s music as being one of the things that helped bring them closer after all those years. When you listen to Presley’s music, the simplicity of everything is what always makes it so much more impactful than the traditional rock and roll tunes.
Was everything he played original? Absolutely not, but what couldn’t be replicated was the attitude that made millions of kids all around the world fall in love with music. It’s never an easy job being that kind of cultural icon, but all Simon could do was thank Presley for the indelible mark that his music left on millions of people all over the country.
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