A 21-year-old Queens College student wrote a song in his parents’ bathroom about how we would all be swallowed up by death. Do your best to make music, but silence will defeat you in the end. “Hello, darkness, my old friend,” he began, singing to the tiles. This was not an obvious chart-topping topic, yet “The Sound of Silence” eventually became a No. 1 hit, and Paul Simon, with his childhood pal Artie Garfunkel rocking a harmony, broke very, very big.
An astonishing trail followed—with and without Garfunkel, in and out of South Africa, Brazil, giving us the dopamine for the brain, rhythm for the body, and tenderness for the heart—all of it still crazy after 60 years. A Paul Simon song knows what you’re thinking, how you’re feeling, how you’re soft in the middle when the rest of life is so hard, how you and everyone you know are slip sliding away. It’s all a redemption narrative. It’s personal and it’s for the world.
