(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Thu 1 January 2026 20:15, UK
The career of Paul Simon isn’t exactly one of everyone getting along whenever they walk into the studio.
The folk icon was always slightly at odds with Art Garfunkel whenever they walked into the studio, and even when working on some of his classics, it took a lot for him to get one take he was happy with, let alone getting everyone together once he began working on projects like Graceland. But even when mixing things up, Simon was always aware that someone would never find the same common ground that he had behind the scenes.
Then again, you wouldn’t know it from listening to his records. Listening to any one of his first few solo records, Simon seems to be one of the most easygoing storytellers in the music industry, and even when something didn’t work out the way it was supposed to, it’s easy to dismiss it as a happy accident in the studio, like when coming up with the strange percussion sounds that open up ‘Cecilia’ on Bridge Over Troubled Water.
By the time Simon had a few albums under his belt, he faced the one problem every single artist faces at one point or another: becoming stale. He simply wasn’t as inspired going into the studio and cutting the same ten or eleven tracks that he had always done back in the day, and he figured the next best thing was for him to go in the opposite direction. After all, Garfunkel had tried moving to the silver screen, so why couldn’t Simon try his hand at writing music for a film?
It’s not like it hadn’t been done before. Elvis Presley and The Beatles had entire movies based around them, and while Simon wouldn’t be starring in the film, his idea for what would become One Trick Pony did have a lot more heart behind it than the traditional music vanity project most rock stars were doing. The only problem was settling on who would be singing his songs onscreen.
Simon was more than capable of appearing onscreen thanks to his various Saturday Night Live appearances, but if he was writing for specific characters, it was better to let the actors do their jobs and express his work the best they can. Most of them seemed to work out pretty well, but when looking at every single actor that came in, Simon didn’t even bother trying to figure out if Richard Dreyfuss could do justice to his music.
All he needed to do was lip-sync, but given Dreyfuss’s signature voice, Simon knew that there was no chance that anyone would believe that he could sing his tunes, saying, “At one point, Richard Dreyfuss and I talked about it. It couldn’t be done. It would have been insurmountable, because I had to give the soundtrack to Warner Bros., and there was no way I could have Richard Dreyfuss singing on it. There was no way Dreyfuss could be in the movie and open his mouth and have my voice come out. It would be funny.”
The audience may have had to suspend their disbelief more than a little bit, but given what previous musicals had done, it’s not like Dreyfuss was going to use his own voice, either. In that case, we would have been in for a situation much like Jack Nicholson’s appearance Tommy where he absolutely butchers a version of ‘Go to the Mirror’ midway through the show.
Making a movie may have been much different from making an album, but even in that scenario, Simon was never one to cut corners. He wanted to make the kind of film that had the same impact as any of his other works, and if that meant shutting the door on a few musical legends, that was fine by him.
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