Even the fun was barbed here – the sexual betrayal inside the hipster lingo of “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” – while a dynamic reunion with Garfunkel, “My Little Town,” came with a bitter moral center: Some homes are only good for leaving. Just as he caught his generation in song as it owned the Sixties, Simon captured its contradictions in middle age – unfulfilled promise, unchecked abandon – in the tender, incisive title song. Paul Simon's Early Years: 10 Fascinating Pre–Simon and Garfunkel Songs But its expansive geniality – the warming-reggae optimism of “Mother and Child Reunion,” recorded in Jamaica the adolescent vigor and spindly Hispanic bounce of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – was perfect pop in design and delivery. In the wake of Bridge’s massive success and deliberate grandeur, the first album of Simon’s new solo career seemed musically spare and more modest in reach. But the friendship, never as strong as the vocal bond, was doomed. The duo’s final studio album veered with meticulous poise from the title hymn – an enduring monument to spiritually inclusive healing and truly angelic singing – to poignant anthropology (“El Condor Pasa”), crisp rockabilly (“Keep the Customer Satisfied”) and baroque-folk majesty (“The Boxer”). Simon and Garfunkel: Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970) “It seems like our fate/To suffer and wait for the knowledge we seek,” he sang. As a young folk singer, Simon was reflective beyond his years here, as he turned 70, he addressed lingering questions (“The Afterlife”) and continued blessings (“Love and Hard Times”) with the craft and curiosity of an affable perpetual seeker. So Beautiful or So What was his most relaxed album – less dense in its tonal and rhythmic experimentation, breezy and vibrant in its Afro-folk step and ruminative spirit. Two and a half decades after Graceland, Simon reminded us why he remained a master. ![]() But Side One was an exquisite suite of urgency and remembering – the distance and despair within families in “Save the Life of My Child,” the passing of this nation’s ideals in “America” – ending with the eerie, prophetic intimacy of “Old Friends” and the early warning in “Bookends Theme.” “Preserve your memories,” the duo sang. Side Two was ultimately an unrelated melange of recent singles. ![]() These high school pals from Queens were three years into their stardom – the biggest, most creatively ambitious act to come out of the folk revival since Bob Dylan – when they made this classic, gorgeous and unprecedented album: a look back at the Sixties even before they ended, as hard lessons and now-distant dreams. Here, in the wake of Simon’s recent 75th birthday, is our comprehensive guide to his life’s work, from 1957 up through the present. ![]() From precocious teen pop upstart in the Fifties to prophetic folk icon in the Sixties and globalist-minded, breathtakingly poetic solo singer-songwriter in the Seventies, Eighties and beyond, he has consistently found ways to both remain relevant and reinvent his sound. For more than five decades, Paul Simon has exerted a massive influence over the American musical landscape.
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