(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Thu 23 April 2026 18:00, UK
When a songwriter like Paul Simon is writing a classic, he’s usually not trying to make another tune with a catchy melody.
Some of the best songs in his arsenal are the ones that take a few more chances across their runtimes, and even when he’s making some of the greatest singalong choruses in his Simon and Garfunkel days, there are more than a few songs that have a bit more of a serious slant than ‘The 59th St Bridge Song’. But while ‘The Boxer’ and ‘The Sound of Silence’ are going to go down in history as absolutely legendary, Simon understood when one of his songs wasn’t really cutting it like it was supposed to.
When looking at the final days of Simon and Garfunkel, Simon was already beginning to turn himself into a much more seasoned songwriter. He had already shown his genius on the previous albums, but it got to the point where it felt like he needed to break free from Art Garfunkel at some point. The tension had become too strong, and there was no sense for Simon to keep writing songs that his partner in crime couldn’t relate to as much.
And while Bridge Over Troubled Water is still a better record for having both of them on the tracks, it does have more than a fair bit of that tension across its runtime. After all, the album was intended to be 12 songs long, but since they began arguing over what was going to be included, Simon figured that it was better to leave off one song instead of trying to begrudgingly work their way through whatever tune that one of them wanted.
It still sounded fantastic, but Simon even felt that you could hear the disconnect in what they were playing. He knew that Garfunkel wanted nothing to do with a song like ‘Baby Driver’, and there were more than a few times where the guitarist was kicking himself for not singing the title track, but there were also more than a few times where his experimentation got the better of him on certain tunes.
He had started to listen to what was coming out of the reggae scene around that time, and while there were a lot of unconventional rhythms on his solo songs like ‘Mother and Child Reunion’, ‘Why Don’t You Write Me’ was one of the few times where he felt that his ambition failed him a little bit, saying, “I got [‘Mother and Child’] by making a mistake. Because ‘Why Don’t You Write Me?’ was supposed to sound like that but it came out a bad imitation. So I said, ‘I’m not going to get it out of the regular guys. I gotta get it out of the guys who know it.’ And I gotta go down there willing to change for them.”
While Simon could only end up sounding like himself, the fact that he was willing to push himself was half the reason why he and Garfunkel drifted apart. It’s not like they absolutely hated each other’s guts every time they played, but when looking at what they wanted out of their own music, it’s not like Simon was going to be making songs like ‘Bright Eyes’ every single time he made a solo record.
And since the rest of his solo catalogue saw him working extensively with different rhythms, he wasn’t about to reel things in on Graceland. He had the ability to create beautiful songs on his own, so after having those hits under his belt, it was time for him to reverse the whole process and start making tracks that had a lot more going for them than just a guy playing an acoustic guitar.
So while ‘Why Don’t You Write Me’ is the kind of failed experiment that Simon couldn’t get together, it became one of the biggest happy accidents of his career. He couldn’t manage to make that kind of music on his own, and if he had got the sound he heard in his head from the word go, perhaps we would have never got the massive world music albums he would release later in life.
