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Sun 27 September 2026 20:30, UK
Everything Paul Simon ever wrote usually came back to him trying to outdo the last record that he made.
He didn’t spend his time writing songs just to become stagnant, and some of the biggest tunes that he ever made usually came from him testing the waters in a genre that he wasn’t as familiar with and walking away with something no one had ever heard before when he was finished. He had come a long way from his origins in the 1960s, but there was still a golden halo put around almost everything that Simon and Garfunkel did.
Their albums weren’t exactly perfect from back to front or anything, but when you look at their track record, Simon had insanely high standards for what he wanted on any one of their records. The first few records that they made fit pretty snugly into the folk category, but by the time they got to Bridge Over Troubled Water, they were already starting to make music that went far beyond the typical setup of an acoustic guitar and some decent Everly Brothers-style harmonies.
But it took a long time before they ended up getting there. No one ends up writing a tune as gorgeous as ‘The Boxer’ on a whim, and each album they made before felt like one step towards something new. ‘The Sound of Silence’ was the first time that the duo found real success, and while that was all due to the strength of Simon’s writing, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme is the first real transition period for the band.
Not all of the songs are unique experiments by any means, but you can definitely feel the duo itching to try out something new. They didn’t want to stay in the pop bubble forever, and for the time, having a song that took the piss out of Bob Dylan on ‘A Simple Desultory Phillipic’ or a decent fingerpicking tune like ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song’ was a breath of fresh air, even if the latter made Simon sick to listen to.
Half of the songs on that record were a bit of a risk, but no one could have gone wrong with a tune like ‘Homeward Bound’. The song is one of the best pop tunes that Simon ever wrote, and no matter how they decided to arrange the tune, everything was going to sound great as long as they had their voice over top of everything. And while Simon didn’t claim that it was his greatest tune, he knew that he was going places when he eventually released it.
The days of Graceland may have helped put his songwriting into perspective, but Simon still felt that ‘Homeward Bound’ represented one of the happiest times he ever had playing music, saying, “There’s something naive and sweet-natured and I must say I like that about it. They’re not angry. And that means that I wasn’t angry or unhappy. And that’s my memory of that time: it was just about idyllic. It was just the best time of my life, I think, up until recently, these last five years or so, six years… This has been the best time of my life. But before that, I would say that that was.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And that kind of infectious energy actually crosses over to the listener half the time they hear it. The melody itself might as well be the audible equivalent of a cosy sweater, and when you hear Simon sing the tune alongside George Harrison on Saturday Night Live, there are few things that compare to how well both of their voices play off each other during every single section of the verse.
Simon had clearly hit a peak in terms of his songwriting career around this time, and while he would keep getting more and more ambitious up until Simon and Garfunkel broke up, he would have been etched into stone forever if he could have kept pumping out songs like this. The entire world was speaking about peace and revolution around that time, but Simon wasn’t afraid to give us some comfort music around that time.
