this is a poll to decide which is the best track on bridge over troubled water by simon and garfunkel

the answer is probably "the only living boy in new york"

Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia Cecilia

^^^ this is also a possible contender

The Boxer.

I've only heard "The Boxer" and the title track, am I missing anything?

My parents owned a restaurant that had a jukebox in the bar the year this came out. People used to get so into it with the feet stomping and stuff that they had to anchor it to the ground to prevent the record skipping specifically on Cecilia.

you're breaking my heart! you're shaking my confidence! daily!

real talk, the car i drive is named Cecilia

:D

It's one of my favorite songs ever tbqh.

jubilaaaaation

she loves me again

I've only heard "The Boxer" and the title track, am I missing anything?

dude waht

i voted for the title track because it's ridiculous and also to piss people off

and because i like it

x-posts

yeah I sort of let that one slide but seriously

WHAT?

I've only heard "The Boxer" and the title track, am I missing anything?

okay are you kidding me here, how did you make it through life without hearing "Cecilia"

I'm with judith re: The Only Living Boy in New York

honestly my favorites on this album are all the lesser-known ones. Title track is too bombastic by the end, The Boxer's good but a bit heavy-handed, El Condor Pasa sort of too lazy... the real gold is Keep the Customer Satisfied (which I have always assumed is about selling weed), Baby Driver, Song for the Asking, So Long Frank Llyod Wright.

all that being said, the sound of this record is amazing and when I caught some "making of" doc recently there were lots of cool tidbits - the percussion in Cecilia is a tape loop of S&G and a bunch of their friends banging on furniture in a living room, the "so long Artie" buried in the mix at the end of So Long Frank Lloyd Wright, etc.

Aero is trolllling, you are trolling, right?
"Cecelia" and "Living Boy" should tie for first, would vote for "El Condor Pass". "The Boxer" is my least fave S&G song too much reverb and "lie die die"

"cecilia" is alright but for uptempo finger-snappin S&G i'd rather have "me & julio"

Oh man aero if you haven't heard "Living Boy", wow. Do you watch American films? Have you heard of a band called Everything But The Girl

No Garfunkel on Julio iirc

this album has been maybe the thing i have listened to most in the last two or three months. i had never heard it before, but my housemate said he had never realised paul simon was so kickass until i moved in and played him constantly. he watched some "making the album" type doc on bbc iplayer and was like "you should seriously watch this" and i watched it when i was off sick from work one day and both of spent about a month talking about how great it is.

i kindof actually hadn't realised how fantastically produced their albums were although i guess this is like the high water mark. its also like magnificently sequenced the songs i already knew seemed so much punchier in this context. particularly cecilia which was my favourite s&g song anyway but which is so fantastic when you hear it in context. the bit where they join in "MAKIN LOVE" is so fantastic, also its just this barrage of rhythm, like more earthy and percussive than you remember it being.

the only living boy was like the biggest revelation.it has this liquid bassline that kind of dances around as the whole thing floats on perfectly modulated reverb, a choir in a wind tunnel this tender paean to friendship the simple chords on the acoustic guitar glistening, something majestic and glacial, a song about brothers.

cool
xpost

such a classic record. sleeper for me is "frank lloyd wright"... but every song here is great, even "baby driver".
i read that 1970 book (covering s&g, beatles, csny etc during that year) a few weeks ago. weirdest detail is that paul simon taught a pop songwriting class at NYU while he was recording this album! just for kicks.

Cecelia would totally fit on a Faust record

haha, would it?
another weird thing in that 1970 book was how the author seemed convinced that Simon was jealous of the attention Garfunkel got -- that Simon thought no one knew he was the songwriter/main genius behind the act. which seemed odd -- it's not like they ever pretended that Garfunkel wrote the songs with Simon, right?

No, no it wouldn't. At all. What a very silly thing to say.

I will rep for 'the Boxer' at any time, though.

cecilia does kindof remind me of parts of patchwork?

Faust never wrote a melody that sweet cmon now

Maybe I should listen to it again, as my main memory of the song is "at thix it'th Thuggs with Thethilia":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmhk7B1hdfY

love whatever that clinking-glasses sound is in the guitar breakdown of Cecilia

Okay, on re-listening to the S&G version, I can see that the rhythm tracks are actually really interestingly done, but I still think the melody line is boring drivel for the most part.

youre boring drivel for the most part

i kindof actually hadn't realised how fantastically produced their albums were although i guess this is like the high water mark.

I think this almost always gets overlooked. seems like a lot of attention has been historically focused on Simon's lyrics and the prettiness/fragility of their harmonies and not, say, the Bob Moog-programmed synth bass on "Save the Life of My Child"

my housemate declared this the best produced album of all time

best: only living boy in new york
worst: there are no bad songs
sleeper: keep the customer happy

went and listened to Cecelia, I've heard that chorus before but never the whole track

when I was in high school the vibe I got from Simon & Garfunkel was deeply "this is the kind of music people you hate really ride hard for" so I avoided the shit out of it

then after high school finding out whether s&g were actually ok didn't seem like a big priority

what kind of people were really into s&g when you went to high school???

professor's kids

ok i had to open itunes and put this on

love just how big and yet delicate these songs are

professor's kids

:(

when I was in high school the vibe I got from Simon & Garfunkel was deeply "this is the kind of music people you hate really ride hard for" so I avoided the shit out of it

I get why people like them even if I can't really go there myself. Like Shakey mentions, 'Save The Life Of My Child' is a good example of them going for weird and not making it, but 'Cecelia' is the one mp3 by them on my hard drive & it's because of the drums & the gated flute break.

the bit on the boxer where it goes "cut him til he cried out" and on the "cut him" there's this perfect shift where he strums real heavy on the guitar and their voices get real emphatic and the whole dynamic sets itself around this sharp fulcrum

there are so many fantastic small details here

that Simon thought no one knew he was the songwriter/main genius behind the act. which seemed odd

I wouldn't be surprised if this was specifically in relation to the title track - which Simon doesn't sing on - and was there biggest hit.

which was their

argh

hmm wait Simon does sing on BOTW he just doesn't sing the lead, right?

Ówen a lotta my weirdo class rage has to do with my biological dad being a professor and my stepdad being a really smart psychopath from a really poor Indiana town with a chip on his shoulder about the intellectual class so the professor-kids of my town were objects of really profound envy to me, and there were tons of them (five colleges in my town) & they were all in my peer group & they all had money & they were all gonna go to Yale or Columbia or NYU & it looked from the outside like their lives kinda fuckin' ruled and they all loved Simon & Garfunkel a lot, mind you I didn't like run around raging against these ppl they were my peer group I just harbored "secret" (i.e. probably not secret) grudges against them

thanks for the free therapy y'all it's actually quite helpful

tell me about your mother

also its so balanced, the way somthing like cecilia cuts into the creaminess of that frank lloyd wright song, or how even the huge echo-voices on the only living boy in new york aren't like EPIC but gaseous and diaphanous. the hugeness of that snare crack but at the same time its just this rudimentary whack, a guy with his arms raised over its head.

gotta go with the boxer for inspiring this story of plagiarism in a queens english class...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt_TOuUOEWY

Dude invented the phrase "bridge over troubled water." Made the damn thin up, and now it's as permanent as Shakespeare.

I don't think of myself as liking this album all that much, but I'm finding it hard to pick one song because I like so many.

I remember my mother asking my brother if "Keep the Customer Satisfied" was about selling drugs and he insisted it wasn't. Then when she was out of the room he turned to me and said: it probably is. And I was shocked he would lie to her like that. (I was in elementary school and he would probably have been in high school at the time.) My mom played the heck out of that album.

youre boring drivel for the most part

;_;

I've never owned it, so I just know (and like) all the hits. Definitely "Cecilia."

If you haven't heard, worth a listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pey29CLID3I

Listening now, this album is kind of amazing, mostly for the inner songs. Also, it's funny to listen now and make all these musical connections I would have been in no position to make when I was much younger. (I don't think I've ever consciously realized "So Long Frank Lloyd Wright" had a bossa feel to it, but it may be a really long time since I've heard it.)

Dude invented the phrase "bridge over troubled water." Made the damn thin up, and now it's as permanent as Shakespeare.

have never heard someone use this phrase outside of paul simon talk

voted el condor pasa but it could be a bunch of these. i prefer any version on live rhymin which i guess is challops? i love that thing.

"Only Living Boy in New York" but it hurts to split it up like this

his image/metaphors are his best trick as a lyricist. "everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance/ everybody thinks its true" like how the metaphor relies one that specificity of the image.

No sweat Aero I just got both parents and step-parents as professors and it didn't get me anything but an intimate knowledge of insect taxonomy. Plus I'm feeling the American culture war a little more sensitively with Election 2012 in my Paul Simon-loving face

I only thought you were trolling cause if I launched into a "L Cohen sucks dog dick" argument then later confessed I'd only heard "Bird on a Wire" you'd probably say nuts to me too

had no idea El Condor Pasa was already a pre-exisitng tune until that BBC doc a few weeks back. the story of how they made that rhythm track on Cecilia was amazing too.

What documentary was that piscesx, would like to hear that story myself

this is such an outstanding album for all the reasons outlined above. the sound of it, the textures, are extraordinary. Simon's songwriting is really inventive here too, the title track and "New York" and "Frank Lloyd Wright" all have clever, unexpected swerves.

i guess "Keep the Customer Satisfied" is "about" dealing weed but really he just uses it as another extended metaphor for the touring musician. it's ridiculously joyous in the context of the dreamy introspective stuff, either way.

This is between Cecelia and Only Boy for me, but really it's a very good record all round. It's the one record my parents had on vinyl, then bought on cassette when it came out, bought it on cd when that came out, and I think they have it as mp3's too.

The title song stood for that Sunday afternoon feeling of my parents getting out the sherry and playing this album. Not cool when you're a 14 year old, but it stuck with me and I now am grateful for them playing it so often I think.

xp The Harmony Game; it's also on the 40th anniversary edition of the CD+DVD package, no throwaway thing either it was 70 minutes long. it was amazing; told you all about how 'anti' the sponsors were of their 1969 TV film 'songs of america'. the 'Bell' telephone company had a big row with them. i literally had no idea they were so political, and had never heard of the 'songs of america' tv show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfu517mGEK4

Thanks!

had no idea El Condor Pasa was already a pre-exisitng tune until that BBC doc a few weeks back. the story of how they made that rhythm track on Cecilia was amazing too.

I only knew this from living near some Peruvian buskers who played it. (I just lucked out and found video of the actual same buskers, below.) So the song is actually an early version of what Simon did decades later, writing pop songs in obscure genres.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yvit9dvKIE

Probably 'Only Living Boy', that's a transcendent piece of music.

I've thinking about 'Keep the Customer' quite a lot lately, mainly to try and work out whether it's 'heard' or 'read' (in the Bible), and how perceptive heard would be, in describing the experience of a former? churchgoer.

Some good thoughts here about the meaning of the lyric

http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/7342/

Vietnam vet? Black salesman?

I always assumed travelling salesman from the bible belt myself.

This was my favourite record between the ages of 6 and 10. It was the only LP my parents played that wasn't Jim Reeves. I remember loving the jauntiness in Keep the Customer Satisfied, and thinking that Only Living Boy was a bit weird and I didn't like it too much. Now listening to it, outside the title track (overplayed) there's not much I'd like to skip. Oh, apart from the Everly Brothers cover, that song's pretty lumpen imo.

Just watched the doc talked about upthread. It's def. worth checking out. I lolled at Paul Simon calling Cecelia "pretty hooky" like he was surprised by it or something.

voted "Only Living Boy", & yeah it's the production: I read or heard that those aaahs in the "chorus" were S&G singing at the top of their lungs, shouting really, voices breaking, but that they'd mixed it to sound like they were just singing backing vocals: so that's what gives those aaahs such intensity. Maybe that's a common trick in production, I dunno, not a gamer: but it's thoroughly moving.

it took me a while to come around to S&G (& to PS also) b/c it was square music to me, but then I grew up & cast aside childish ways

I don't know... I like most of the songs on this album, but to me "The Boxer" is classic and timeless and perfect in a way "Cecillia" or "Only Boy" just don't approach. Its interesting that everyone seems to have a lot of real serious S&G opinions and knowledge to drop.

It has to be 'The Only Living Boy In New York', without a second thought or any doubt. Absolutely wonderful harmonies, and such a beautiful tune. Possibly my favourite Simon & Garfunkel song overall as well.

i was really hoping horseshoe was gonna show up on this at some point.

It was the only LP my parents played that wasn't Jim Reeves.

Tell a lie, it was Jim Reeves and Charley Pride in my house, wall to wall. I had to scrape by with S&G and Buddy Holly's Greatest Hits.

I keep forgetting that "The Boxer" is the lie-luhlie song

"Cecilia" is probably my favorite S&G song though, I just adore the percussion to bits

these guys are fucking amazing tho, I don't listen to them nearly enough

when Cleveland Jr started singing his personalized love song to his g/f Cecilia on the latest Cleveland Show, I was hoping he was about to launch into a flamenco version of the S&G tune.

alas, it didn't happen

(granted those lyrics wouldn't have been very romantic but go with me on this)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

sorry, plax, i didn't see this poll! also i don't know the s & g albums that well tbh. will listen!

the 3 massive songs on this (boxer, only living boy, cecilia) just super overfamiliar to want to vote for even tho they're the 3 best songs. voted bye bye love instead which is also massively good.

Tons of well-constructed, well-performed, well-written stuff in here - despite sentimental favorites in "Customer" and "Why Don't You Write Me?", I think it has to be either "Cecilia," "The Boxer," or "The Only Living Boy In New York," each of which just NAILS its vibe to the wall, nothing out of place, so precisely-made! So brilliantly sung! "Boy" for pathos, "Cecilia" for memories of joy singing along to it in big happy groups of people...I can't decide. This is a really really strong record.

I will say that "Condor" and "Frank Lloyd Wright," though both great, sort of slow down this record for me - would be great to have a whole late S&G album of just that kind of thing, but in light of the uptempo and mega-produced things...they don't feel slight, just sort of dwarfed. They'd be great on that first Simon solo record.

I can see why Simon would be all defensively "Hey, waitaminit, I wrote that!" when Garfunkel's singing "Bridge." But when Aretha or Elvis sang it, he no doubt beamed and elbowed whomever he's standing next to and said, "Heh...you know, I wrote that."

horseshoe! we always say with this really absolute certainty that paul simon is so much better than simon and garfunkel but this album was really a huge surprise from me. i think i got confused by the narrative of his own solo stuff where it starts with this really stripped down album and afterwards seems to pick up tricks from all these different experiments and collaborations (jazzy chord shapes, high life bass, shimmering adult contempo production tricks) bit then this album a lot of these ideas are already embedded in it and working in different ways. to the extent that i want to put them all on different simon albums (el condor pasa on the rhythm of the saints, keep the customer satisfied on paul simon, song for the asking on still crazy). the main thing that's happening on this album that he never came back to really is the vastness of them. these voices finding each other in enormous space and the harmonies are out of this world even though i sortof wanted to think of them as being really a bit trite and saccharine before i got properly into it.

would be great to have a whole late S&G album of just that kind of thing

By rearranging tracks from Bookends and BOTW you could probly make a fantastic version of this

I love The Boxer with a fierce passion, lieluhlies & all.

Ppl seem a bit cautious about praising it: is that bcz of Dyln's cover?

I love both the original and Dylan's cover.

Hard for me to pick a winner here, as there are at least five in the running (first three, "The Boxer" and "Only Living Boy"). Big fan of "Customer" and "Frank Lloyd Wright", too. Easily one of my favorite albums of the 70s.

I grew up with Bridge Over Troubled Water, as S&G and The Beatles were household staples throughout my childhood. I doubt I went more than a couple months during the first decade of my life without hearing one or the other, usually this album or Sgt. Pepper's. As a result, it's sometimes hard for me to really hear BOTW, nostalgic familiarity overtaking fresh perception. For that reason, I've really enjoyed reading judith's responses in this thread. Reminds me of lying on the living room rug as kid, my head between the speakers, marveling at the harmonies and production.

Anyway, The Boxer.

Pretty sure "El Condor Pasa" was in there somewhere when Abba were writing "Fernando"

I voted for "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" because it is the one that has grown in my estimation the most over my lifetime with the record (it is literally the first record I remember hearing). I thought it was dull as a kid, without the bombastic drums of "Cecelia" or the thunderous booms of "The Boxer" or the sing-along chorus' of so much of the record. But as I've gotten older, the lyrics, the delivery, the subdued bossa vibe have all hit me harder and harder. It's such a lived in song from a couple of guys still in their 20s.

I should read what I plan to post - that's got some interesting construction and grammatical issues, as always.

unrelated to this specific album but posting here cuz what the hell. Apparently this was the b-side to "Fakin' It", and is their only non-album b-side...? weird.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raaQXN91PHs

have always wondered what the story was behind the sampled dialogue in the middle of Fakin' It, anyone know the background on that...?

the correct answer is the title track

lol what?

i have been listening to this album so much since you started this poll... i still like 'only living boy' the most, its so soft and pretty and self-conscious just the way he sortof drags out the beginning of 'i get the news i need on the weather report' with this hesitant 'ahh' is so amazing

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Fair enough.

Absolutely no surprises for me there with the top spot, 'The Only Living Boy In New York' is sublime. I'm very surprised that 'El Condor Pasa' didn't come higher, though.

me too!

"El Condor Pasa" is my least favorite song on the record.

boo

the lyrics are like a holdover from a more cloying, less-self assured earlier period of Simon's songwriting imho

you only say that because you would rather be a snail

well I do leave a trail of slime wherever I go

^^^(obscure Bloom County joke/ref that probably only Ned will get)

plax i just want you to know that i am going to compile all your paul simon/simon and garfunkel-related posts and craft them into a book and read it while i listen to this album and all the paul simon albums. which is all i'm going to ever do for the rest of my life.

have always wondered what the story was behind the sampled dialogue in the middle of Fakin' It, anyone know the background on that...?

― locally sourced stabbage (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, January 12, 2012 6:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Well, I know that it's not sampled, and was in fact voiced in the studio by Beverley Martyn (later to marry John Martyn). She's saying 'Good morning, Mr. Leitch' because they wanted to come up with a 'character' for this 'shop scene' in the middle of the song, and Beverley Martyn suggested using Donovan's surname.

That lyric is just basically Paul Simon saying if he'd existed a century ago, he wouldn't be earning money writing songs, he'd be a tailor instead.

haha waht that is so random

love whatever that clinking-glasses sound is in the guitar breakdown of Cecilia

― The Silent Extreme (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, January 6, 2012 11:19 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Are you talking about the instrumental part? That's a heavily limited xylophone, played by Paul.

Only Boy in New York is the 'best', but my favourite is narrowly 'Song for the Asking'. That cello counterpoint! So beautiful. Especially given how it fades in from the audience applause at the end of Bye Bye Love.

I'm in two minds about the length of 'Song For The Asking'... some days I wish it was longer, but on others I think the length of it is just perfect.

wow what a great song "keep the customer satisfied" is!

yeah it is, love that final orchestra hit

baby driver rightfully marginalized as the james taylor cover it is

its also like magnificently sequenced the songs i already knew seemed so much punchier in this context.

this is so true! i finally get "the boxer."

everywhere i go
i get slandered
LIIIIIIIIIIBELED
i hear words i never heard in the bible

but the best part of breaking up
is when you're making up with me

the 75 minute doc i was burbling about upthread starts on BBC4 UK in about 25 minutes and will then be available to watch for about a week afterwards.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0171r6x

I just want to throw this on here:

http://lightbulbhead.tumblr.com/post/16178795155/b-b-s-g

aw the BBC doc is UK only...

top two are abt right

i don't think i ended up voting, but it would have been "only living boy," though "keep the customer satisfied" was a delightful discovery i might never have made if not for this thread! i was seriously wrong about simon & garfunkel.

i know! how embarrassing. im saving bookends. dont anyone try to poll this without me or ill find out where you live

listening to this LP back to back with solo simon stuff just reminds me how much he needed to cut artie out.

sorry artie.

not that there isn't really good stuff on this LP, but that overall it feels kind of watery, and even the best songs are a bit hampered by the vocal arrangements.

So Long FLW is the best wreckognize

I don't know David Browne's writing at all, but I'm really looking forward to this:

http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/story/crosby-stills-nash-young-enchant-london-audience-in-1970-20110601/1000x306/main.jpg

I ordered it the minute I saw it, not realizing it wouldn't be out for months.

and even the best songs are a bit hampered by the vocal arrangements.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Friday, 10 February 2012 22:26 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://i946.photobucket.com/albums/ad303/menageabro/picardfacepalm.gif

I GET SLANDERED, LIIIIBELED, I HEAR WORDS I NEVER HEARD IN THE BIBLE

UPGRADE TO PRO TODAY!

UPGRADE YR OPINIONS TODAY!

it was picardfacepalm.gif ftr

What, clemenza, that book came out last year.

I ordered the trade paperback, so I guess that's what comes out in the summer. Dumb--the hardcover wasn't all that much more.

Heard the best version ever of "El Condor Pasa" tonight.

I GET SLANDERED, LIIIIBELED, I HEAR WORDS I NEVER HEARD IN THE BIBLE

― flopson, Saturday, February 11, 2012 1:32 AM (Yesterday)

Wow I might need to read the 1970 book

The thing about this record is that "The Only Living Boy In New York" is SUCH a "last song" that everything after that feels like a bonus track, and ALSO feels like a "last song." It makes the album simultaneously seem way too short and way too long, for me anyway.

Wasn't feeling well today and decided to watch "The Harmony Game" which turned out to be what the doctor ordered

yeah amazing innit.

El condor pasa is from 1910 or so and is inspired by Andean (Peruvian) music. I don't know if it became even more popular in latin grounds after Paul Simon's version but it is quite surely the second most overplayed Andean-style song after 'Huamaqueño' (aka carnavalito)'. There's too many versions of the later in youtube (even a King Africa one which I find hilarious and that predates reggaeton)... I kind of hate the ones I've found so I'll post a random live version because it captures better how I often hear the song anyways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDUL3w7zFD4

Funny thing about those two songs is that they're the ones that define Andean music for pretty much all the world and 'Huamahuaqueña' is actually from Argentina, not Peru and I believe most people think 'el condor pasa' is originally by Paul Simon.

this is the only version of "el condor pasa" that truly matters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAeV2PTIofA

btw these are the guys who played with simon & garfunkel (as 'los incas' at the time) for their rendition of "el condor pasa". they renamed themselves URUBAMBA and made an album produced by PS at the early 70s.

http://i.imgur.com/PcTRl.jpg

super cool groovy andean music, anyone knows this particular record?

i feel like even as a kid i knew "El Condor Pasa" was a trad arr tune

a robbie basho el condor pasa wld be such an obviously splendid fit it must surely exist already, on another plane if not this one

I groaned when I was at the Valley of the Moon, just outside La Paz, Bolivia in the midst of the Andes, & a guy on a pan flute showed up & played "El Condor Pasa". like, we're tourists, but pretty hardcore ones given where we're at: surely you can appease us with something that we haven't heard before?

How did I miss this poll? Would've voted for Customer, which is fucking raucous, on the assumption that TOLBINY would win anyway.

I don't know where to post this unusual detail in a Wikipedia article so I am posting it here:

Halee grew up on Long Island, New York. His father, also named Roy Halee, provided the singing voice for Mighty Mouse in late 1940s Terrytoons cartoons, as well as the voices of Heckle and Jeckle from 1951 through 1961.

And a link to an interesting interview with Roy: http://www.mixonline.com/mag/audio_roy_halee/

The revive inspired my choice at last night's Devon Record Club. http://devonrecordclub.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/simon-and-garfunkel-bridge-over-troubled-water-round-29-nicks-choice/

Some relatives put this on today and it reminded me how much I disliked the original album sequence.

The first time I heard it, I was generally a fan of Paul Simon's solo work and Bookends, but I didn't like this album. I couldn't get into it and returned it to the library. Then about two, maybe three years later, I checked out the Old Friends box set from 1997, and for whatever reason, I mistook disc three as presenting the album as-is with some bonuses surrounding it, similar to what the Peel Slowly and See box set did with the Velvet Underground albums. (The one exception was "Bye Bye Love" - they included a live recording that had nothing to do with the album, so I figured they just dropped the album's version to avoid redundancy.) Something about that sequence completely worked. It was a night and day difference to me and the effect was immediate, it made me a fan.

It wasn't until later that I realized the album had a different sequence - in fact, Old Friends programmed everything chronologically by recording date, meaning there was no artistic thought put into it, just cold logic, but it worked well enough to me that I programmed the album that way in iTunes and elsewhere:

1. The Boxer
2. Baby Driver
3. Why Don't You Write Me
4. Keep the Customer Satisfied
5. So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright
6. Bye Bye Love (not on Old Friends, but it can only go here due to the cross-fade)
7. Song for the Asking
8. Cecilia
9. El Condor Pasa (If I Could)
10. Bridge Over Troubled Water
11. The Only Living Boy in New York

Listening to the album as it was released, I can see why I didn't like it. The slight numbers feel more inconsequential when they're scattered between the heavier songs. Grouped together, they feel more sturdy as a small run of really tuneful and catchy numbers. The title cut always felt overwrought to me and following it with "El Condor Pasa" made the whole thing feel pretentious from the get-go. With a long build-up to those tracks (with the title cut as the climax), it feels much more organic to me. Even the title cut doesn't feel so over-the-top - like it makes sense for it to rise up to that level when it's placed as the penultimate track.

And both "The Boxer" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" feel like the perfect opening and closing track, especially the latter - it just feels like a logical conclusion. Listening to the album as it was released, it just sounds weird and tacked-on to have "Why Don't You Write Me" follow "The Only Living Boy in New York," and "Why Don't You Write Me" feels even more slight as a result, like a nothing track.

The only thing that might be off for some (but not me) is "Song for the Asking" in the number 7 slot. I can *see* how it's designed to be a closing track, but it doesn't do the job as well. It feels too light and wistful - if they wanted this album to be a major statement, it doesn't feel like the a great way of ending it at all. (Segueing it with a perfunctory "Bye Bye Love" doesn't help.) It does just fine to me slotted before "Cecilia."

All good points. If "Song for the Asking" didn't have the live segue, it could go first as a brief intro, like "Bookends Theme".

I'm wondering if there's a work part that doesn't have the segue? Usually they exist - like they mix down the two songs separately, then bounce them down to another tape to create the crossfade. (It would be too much of a pain, maybe even impossible, to create that crossfade in mixdowns created straight from the multitrack of two different songs.) The Old Friends box set would've been the ideal place to include it but they didn't - it fades in on the applause at the end of "Bye Bye Love."

the only living boy was like the biggest revelation.it has this liquid bassline that kind of dances around as the whole thing floats on perfectly modulated reverb, a choir in a wind tunnel this tender paean to friendship the simple chords on the acoustic guitar glistening, something majestic and glacial, a song about brothers.

― judith, Friday, January 6, 2012 4:56 PM (ten years ago) bookmarkflaglink

love this. and the idea of the wind tunnel -- I can never decide if those voices are in closed or open space, moving or still, but that image works.

of all the amazing moments on this album though, on revisit nothing gets me like the addition of "up in my bedroom" on "Cecilia," just beaming, superfluous beauty

that wind tunnel choir very sgt pepper's to me, lucy in the sky