(Credits: Far Out / Record Sleeve)
Tue 3 March 2026 21:00, UK
Paul Simon has always been the kind of songwriter who wanted every part of the song to feel perfect.
As much as people like the idea of having a catchy tune that they could turn their brains off to whenever they turned on the radio, a lot of what made Simon’s songs work so well is because of the deeper meaning behind his lyrics than the usual love songs. He wanted to tell stories that went far beyond the traditional rock and roll format, but he felt that the magic was balancing every single part of the musical process.
If anything, that’s half the reason why Simon and Garfunkel took off to begin with. As much as Simon might have hated the idea of adding a rock and roll band to beef up ‘The Sound of Silence’, the reason why it remains one of the most classic songs of all time is because of the drama that the rest of the band gives to his lyrics whenever the drums come in on the remixed version of the tune.
But even if Simon didn’t get his way in that particular instance, he wanted to have songs that had a perfect marriage of lyric and melody. He doesn’t mince words about the times when he thought he failed to get both of them right, but when you hit on a melody and a lyric as beautiful as ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, it’s hard to say that he exactly “failed” as a songwriter by the time that he branched out on his own.
Not every choice that he made was going to be perfect, but it was better for him to take chances than get too caught up in what people thought he was supposed to sound like. There’s a good chance that people would have thought he was crazy trying to make an album of world music as he did on Graceland, but his songwriting had grown to the point where he could write based on the kind of musicians he was working with.
While a lot of those tunes have been immortalised in the rock canon at this point, Simon still thought that the most important thing was the melody of the tune. He did see himself as a fair competitor to someone like Bob Dylan in the lyrical department, but when looking back on the greatest hymns of all time, Simon still felt that the best songs were the ones that people remembered for the tune.
That could apply to rock and roll, it could apply to world music, and in Simon’s case, he felt that not even hymns like ‘Silent Night’ were safe from sounding a little bit humdrum if they didn’t have a good melody behind it, saying, “If you take really touching words… let’s say ‘Silent Night’, both in German and in English. The words are very simple, and they’re very beautiful. But if they’re not connected to that melody, they don’t last for hundreds of years, and move people the way they did.”
It’s hard to apply that to a song that feels like it’s been etched in stone at this point, but it’s a lot easier to hear what Simon is getting at when looking at the words on their own. Yes, the song can be an absolute classic during the holidays and is a fantastic way to get the family together when going to Christmas Mass, but if you remove the iconic melody from the tune, the song itself reads more like a laundry list of what’s happening during the birth of Jesus rather than anything too spellbinding.
Then again, that’s the power of what melodies can do to any great song. No one walks away from a song purely thinking of the lyrics, and the real magic behind any great tune is getting the right notes together that will make everyone feel the meaning behind every single line that you say.