I really wanted to write a post about Art Garfunkel without mentioning Paul Simon.
My plan was to read about him, find footage of old interviews, and discover some corner of his life that was completely independent of his relationship with Paul Simon.
And it almost worked.
For example, I didn’t know about Garfunkel’s love of walking. He walked across Japan in the early 80s, and later that same decade walked coast to coast across the United States (in 40 instalments, always picking up where he had previously left off). He did the same in Europe, beginning in the early 90s and ending in 2015.
I can get behind anyone who loves walking.
He is also very into lists: his website lists a variety of things, from his favourite songs to his favourite places in New York to every book he has read since 1968.
I can get behind anyone who makes lists.
But it is impossible (for me, at least) to learn anything about Art Garfunkel without hearing the echoes of Paul Simon in the background. Interviews like this one with The Telegraph make me wonder if it’s possible for Garfunkel himself to identify as anything other than Paul Simon’s long-ago sidekick.
Their success as a duo seems to have been built on a kind of twisted mutual envy: Simon envied Garfunkel’s voice, while Garfunkel envied Simon’s songwriting. Despite giving the world some fantastic music, their relationship is layered with the scars of disagreements and break-ups and fallings-out.
Of course, it doesn’t help that almost every interview they undertake inevitably comes around to the subject of their friendship. It must be tiresome for each of them individually, but when they’re together it becomes almost painful to watch.
Paul Simon appears to have gotten over their differences – I guess decades of sustained fame and Grammy awards will do that – but I’m not so sure that Art Garfunkel has made the same peace with the past, and I can’t blame him. We all occasionally have that pesky negative inner voice telling us that we’re not good enough. Can you imagine how loud that voice would sometimes get if your name had become cultural shorthand for second best?
There is plenty of beauty in Garfunkel’s repertoire, and plenty I could have written about aside from his relationship with Paul Simon. But in some ways, the beauty of Garfunkel songs like this one, from his 1977 solo album of the same name, is made more poignant by the shadow in which it exists.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. Garfunkel’s voice. He’s most known for his big moments, like the last chorus of the song we listened to in week 102. But on this song he reminds us that his quieter, half-whispering voice is just as compelling.
2. About one minute in, we start hearing some background instrumentation – xylophones maybe – that sound just a bit like the tonal percussion in the Paul Simon song we listened to in week 408.
3. The lyrics. He didn’t write them; credit there goes to Jimmy Webb, who, like Paul Simon, is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. But Webb’s lyrics provide incredibly apt symbolism for Paul Simon’s enduring presence in Art Garfunkel’s life: “It’s like a watermark that’s never there and never really gone.”
Recommended listening activity:
Re-working any New Year’s resolutions that implicitly compare you to other people.