Wow! Where did this week go??? I can’t believe it’s the last day of Simon & Garfunkel Week already. Still so many I had hoped to play! As I did on the final day of Van Morrison Week, I will play a few more today with just a snippet of trivia and sans lyrics so that you can get a final burst of enjoyment from the duo and their music.
♫ Homeward Bound ♫
Paul Simon lived in Brentwood, Essex, England when he wrote this song. When traveling back from Wigan, where he was playing, he got stuck at the train station and wrote this. The song has a double meaning: literally, wanting for a ticket home to Brentwood, but on the other hand, yearning to go to his home in the US. Says Simon …
“That was written in Liverpool when I was traveling. What I like about that is that it has a very clear memory of Liverpool station and the streets of Liverpool and the club I played at and me at age 22. It’s like a snapshot, a photograph of a long time ago. I like that about it but I don’t like the song that much. First of all, it’s not an original title. That’s one of the main problems with it. It’s been around forever. No, the early songs I can’t say I really like them. But 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.”
♫ The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) ♫
The 59th Street bridge (officially the Queensboro Bridge), goes over the East River in New York City, connecting Queens to Manhattan. Simon & Garfunkel are from New York, which has a very hectic pace. In this song they remind us to slow down and appreciate the simple pleasures in life, like cobblestones and flowers.
When he performed at Tufts University in 1966, Simon said of this song:
“I spent most of the year 1965 living in England, and at the end of that year in December, I came back to the United States, ‘The Sound Of Silence’ had become a big hit, and I had to make this adjustment from being relatively unknown in England to being semi-famous here, and I didn’t really swing with it. It was a very difficult scene to make, and I was writing very depressed-type songs until around June of last year. I started to swing out of it, I was getting into a good mood, and I remember coming home in the morning about 6 o’clock over the 59th Street Bridge in New York, and it was such a groovy day really, a good one, and it was one of those times when you know you won’t be tired for about an hour, a sort of a good hanging time, so I started to write a song that later became the 59th Street Bridge Song or Feelin’ Groovy.”
♫ I Am A Rock ♫
I Am a Rock is a song written by Paul Simon. It was first performed by Simon alone as the opening track on his album The Paul Simon Songbook which he originally recorded and released in August 1965, only in the United Kingdom. Simon & Garfunkel re-recorded it on December 14, 1965, and included as the final track on their album Sounds of Silence, which they released on January 17, 1966. It was released as a single in 1966, and subsequently included as the B-side of the 1971 A-side reissue of The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy). Confused yet?
♫ El Condor Pasa (If I Could) ♫
This song started out as an Andean folk melody that Paul Simon came across in 1969 when he played a week-long engagement at a theater in Paris along with the South American group Los Incas, who played an instrumental version of the song called Paso Del Condor. Said Simon: “I used to hang around every night to hear them play that. I loved it and I would play it all the time, and then I thought, Let’s put words to it.”
The Peruvian songwriter Daniel Robles recorded this song in 1913, and copyrighted it in the United States in 1933 during his travels in America. When Simon recorded it with his added lyrics, he thought it was a traditional song, as that’s what Los Incas told him. When Robles’ son filed a lawsuit, Simon had to give Robles a composer credit on the song, with his estate getting those royalties.
♫ Cecilia ♫
Not too much should be read into the lyrics of this song. As Paul Simon explained in an interview with Rolling Stone: “Every day I’d come back from the studio, working on whatever we were working on, and I’d play this pounding thing. So then I said, ‘Let’s make a record out of that.’ So we copied it over and extended it double the amount, so now we have three minutes of track, and the track is great. So now I pick up the guitar and I start to go, ‘Well, this will be like the guitar part’ – dung chicka dung chicka dung, and lyrics were virtually the first lines I said: ‘You’re breakin’ my heart, I’m down on my knees.’ They’re not lines at all, but it was right for that song, and I like that. It was like a little piece of magical fluff, but it works.”
And that’s it for Simon & Garfunkel Week! I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did!
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