The Quiet Isolation Comfort of Simon and Garfunkel
I’ve been thinking, especially as of late, that songs written in the 1960s and 70s feel stripped-down and pure compared to their contemporary counterparts. Given the United States’ recent spike in unemployment and broad economic upheaval, songs about chasing tail and blowing cash may as well be written in a foreign language. Older folk songs use simple language to capture humble emotions like loneliness, heartbreak, and longing. Recently, those are the songs I’ve been turning to.
My friends introduced me to The Backstreet Boys and TLC, but I mostly grew up listening to Eric Clapton, U2, Elton John, R.E.M., Van Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix, to name a few. In these uncertain times, I find myself turning back to familiar classics, like Simon and Garfunkel’s 1972 release, Greatest Hits, which was served up regularly with weekend pancakes when I was little.
Apart from masterful lyrics, the brilliance of Simon and Garfunkel is how cleanly the duo capture a scene, or a feeling, or a short story. This morning, lost in a pre-caffeine daze, “Homeward Bound” caught me off-guard.
Everyday's an endless stream Of cigarettes and magazines,
And each town looks the same to me,
The movies and the factories,
And every stranger's face I see
Reminds me that I long to be …
Homeward bound.
I wish I was
Homeward bound.
Home, where my thought's escaping
Home, where my music's playing
Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.
Home is more than a place—it’s a feeling—and lately, locked in my actual home, I’ve felt displaced. The world will be uncertain for an indefinite period of time, and with each news cycle comes a constant reevaluation of familiar objects. My closet of camping gear, for instance, has been recast as Temporarily Useless: Potential Clutter.
It’s possible that something in Simon and Garfunkel’s music makes more sense in these tumultuous times, since they also lived through race riots and culture wars. I don’t pretend to be an expert in 1970s U.S. culture, and my dad may not be either, but he was alive during the time and went to a lot of concerts, so I gave him a call.
In so many words, he said yes. “From Sounds of Silence, you could see that they had a real vision that almost was speaking to the industrial-technological movement and how it was sort of dehumanizing people,” he says.
During grad school, I often turned to “The Boxer,” and the subsequent Mumford and Sons cover, particularly on the long walks to campus. The daily grind and making ends meet would resonate with most anyone, and Simon and Garfunkel captured that struggle in a simple vignette.
Asking only workman's wages
I come looking for a job,
But I get no offers,
Just a come-on from the whores
On Seventh Avenue.
I do declare,
there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there.
Then I'm laying out my winter clothes
And wishing I was gone,
Going home,
Where the New York City winters
Aren't bleeding me,
Leading me,
Going home.
These lyrics could be on a syllabus for any intro to narrative writing class. This simple story about a man looking for work and receiving a proposition instead of a job is crushing. The juxtaposition between “honest” labor and the “sin” of a whorehouse, and the proximity between the two, is pure poetry.
“The voice in that song does not judge, which is really kind of neat,” says my dad, who I learned listens to “The Boxer” as his pre-running pump-up song. “The voice in that song isn’t being chauffeured around. It’s really kind of struggling, but is still hanging on, because that voice really knows what it is, who he is.”
He also hit on a theme of quiet resilience, largely absent in our usual image and social media-obsessed existences. “He’s not a tragic figure, because there’s some pride in him. Tragic in a certain way, because he realizes he’s not going to be the world champion, but he’s proud somehow that he’s a boxer. He’s not bitter, so you can’t really pity him, but you can empathize.”
That resilience resonates with me, but so, too, does the theme of loneliness. “I mean it says it right there, the come-on from the whores—that person isn’t being invited to a lot of lunches,” observed my dad. “That person doesn’t come home to a bunch of notes stuck on their door from different people, ‘Where were you?’”
While we can still connect with friends and family through phone calls, video chats, care packages, and handwritten letters, there’s something irreplaceable about human interaction. Sometimes, text messages can feel like stacked-up reminders of what we’re missing, like notes left on a door.
Maybe one aspect of our new reality, cast in a harsh spotlight by the COVID-19 pandemic, is that we have a lot of time to reflect on what’s actually important to us.
We work our jobs,
Collect our pay,
Believe we're gliding down the highway,
When in fact, we're slip slidin' away.