DC Share Revival: Review: Simon & Garfunkel - Sounds of Silence (recorded 1964-66, released 1966)

Rating: 90/100 - Genré: Folk, Folk Baroque,

Folk Pop, Folk Rock, Songwriter

Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, released by Columbia Records on January 17, 1966, arrived not as a leisurely-crafted statement but as an artifact born of sudden momentum and quick decisions: the record stands at once as a collection of songs pulled from different moments of Paul Simon’s creative life and as a commercial response to a single that exploded on American radio. The single’s conversion from an austere acoustic demo into a chart-topping electric record was the fulcrum that forced the label and studio to assemble an album almost immediately. That combination of hurried assembly and concentrated songwriting produces an album that rewards attentive listening precisely because it brings together material from separate sessions and eras into a surprisingly coherent whole.

The most famous production intervention lies at the album’s center: Tom Wilson, a Columbia staff producer handling other projects at the time, took the acoustic March 10, 1964 recording of The Sound of Silence and oversaw electric overdubs—guitars, bass and drums—without the duo’s prior involvement. The remixed single began to break on regional radio in late 1965 and rose to the top of the U.S. singles chart in January 1966, an ascent that converted a slow-selling folk couple into a prominent presence on pop radio and compelled Columbia to press an LP to match the public’s sudden appetite. That act—an unauthorized but decisive studio reworking—reordered both the duo’s public fortunes and the label’s release plans. The instrumental contributions on those electric overdubs are documented with names such as Al Gorgoni, Vinnie Bell, Bob Bushnell (sometimes credited under alternate names on pressings), and Bobby Gregg, studio players who brought the single’s pulse and groove into sharper relief and who fit the era’s pattern of calling on top session talent to translate acoustic material for a pop market.

Simon & Garfunkel’s early career took an abrupt turn after the commercial failure of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., and that episode led directly to a period in which the duo were not operating as an active partnership: they parted ways for a while, with Paul Simon heading to England to continue writing and recording and Art Garfunkel returning to his academic pursuits at home. During his months in Britain Simon documented a string of intimate acoustic songs—material that would appear in the small-run album The Paul Simon Songbook and that supplied a ready pool of compositions when circumstances in the United States suddenly changed; among these was Kathy’s Song, which traces its origin to his time abroad and to an individual connection he maintained there.

Behind the album’s surface lies a clustered set of session dates and a mixed provenance that explains its sometimes-varied sonic character. Most of the album’s work concentrates in 1965, with sessions spanning spring through winter and the acoustic core of the title track reaching back to March 10, 1964; producers and engineers who touched the record include Tom Wilson (the decisive single intervention) and studio figures such as Roy Halee and Bob Johnston who are associated with the sessions and mixes that produced the finished LP. The result is plainly a pragmatic project: Columbia folded recent studio work with Paul Simon’s England-period recordings—many of which he had captured for The Paul Simon Songbook—instead of pausing for a fully new album, and that assemblage strategy produces an album whose songs sometimes sit in different production worlds yet rarely feel at odds in temperament.

That temperament emerges in the record’s songwriting and arrangement choices, where two tendencies in Paul Simon’s writing are visible side by side. On one hand there are compact, image-driven miniatures such as April Come She Will, brief pieces of precise phrasing and quiet melodic motion; on the other hand there are longer, more argumentative or observational songs such as The Sound of Silence and I Am a Rock, which address themes of urban alienation and self-protective withdrawal. Songs from Simon’s England period, including Kathy’s Song, link directly to a figure from that time—Kathleen Chitty—and the material he carried back into American sessions bears the marks of travel, homesickness and reflective lyricism. Intervening in that British thread is the instrumental Anji, a cover of Davy Graham’s fingerstyle composition, which functions as a technical showcase for Simon’s guitar work and as an explicit nod to the British folk-guitar tradition that influenced his playing while abroad. Another example of literary borrowing on the LP is Richard Cory, a setting that translates an Edwin Arlington Robinson poem into a concise folk-rock statement rather than an extended adaptation. The juxtaposition of intimate, acoustic numbers with tracks delivered in a fuller, beat-driven format is one of the album’s defining characteristics and the reason many hear it as a transitional document between spare folk presentation and radio-ready folk-rock arrangements.

The record’s production and pressing history provide a further layer of detail. The electric single mix of The Sound of Silence differs audibly from several LP tracks: it uses a more pronounced echo treatment and a punchier rhythm-section presence, and aficionados point to differences between mono single pressings, early LP mixes and later remasters as evidence that the record exists in multiple technical variants. Session logs and label documentation place many of the overdub and re-recording dates across April–December 1965, while the initial acoustic backing track predates those overdubs by more than a year, explaining the album’s partly hybrid construction. The LP’s cover photograph, shot at Franklin Canyon Park in Los Angeles, and the existence of early pressing anomalies—such as a misspelling of Anji on some sleeves and minor variations in matrix numbers—have made certain pressings especially sought after by collectors who enjoy tracing small physical differences back to specific production runs. At the same time, primary documents show tiny discrepancies—alternate overdub dates in session logs versus press sheets and variant credit spellings across issues.

Commercially, the chain of singles that surrounds the album tells a clear story of rapid reorientation. The electric remix of The Sound of Silence became the chart-topper that January, establishing the duo’s mainstream presence; subsequent singles from the period, including a reworked I Am a Rock—which began life as a solo acoustic piece and was later rerecorded with Garfunkel—reached the upper reaches of the pop charts and confirmed that Columbia’s strategy of recasting Simon’s England-era songs for American radio could succeed. In short order the duo followed commercial triumphs with a steady recording schedule, and singles such as Homeward Bound also entered the public’s attention in that same creative surge.

The record’s afterlife confirms that reassessment. Songs from the sessions found renewed exposure through film and other media—April Come She Will was placed in the soundtrack of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967), for example—and such placements extended the reach and cultural memory of the Sounds of Silence era well beyond its initial chart runs. The album has been reissued and remastered repeatedly over the decades; Columbia/Legacy’s remastered CD editions and later packages have added demos and alternate takes that let listeners trace how tracks were assembled in 1965–70, and a notable reissue cycle in the early 2000s brought bonus material that opened up the LP’s session history to a wider audience.

Ultimately, Sounds of Silence sits at an intersection: it is a commercial artifact created to match a hit single’s momentum, and it is an early artistic statement where Paul Simon’s England material and a studio-driven electric single met and altered the duo’s course. The record’s assembly—clustered sessions across 1965 that incorporated earlier acoustic work, the involvement of prominent studio hands such as Al Gorgoni, Vinnie Bell, Bob Bushnell and Bobby Gregg, and the production touch of Tom Wilson, Roy Halee and Bob Johnston—illustrates how the mechanisms of the mid-1960s record business could convert songwriting into chart presence, and how those mechanics in turn shaped the creative choices the duo made thereafter. Listeners who approach the album with awareness of its origins hear not only an array of well-crafted songs—The Sound of Silence, Kathy’s Song, Anji, Richard Cory, April Come She Will, I Am a Rock—but also the imprint of a moment when studio decision-making and songwriterly craft collided and pushed a young act rapidly into a new field of opportunity. The result remains an instructive and compelling record for anyone interested in how pop records were made, marketed and experienced at a moment of quick change in the mid-1960s.

Sunday, August 24, 2025

Review: Simon & Garfunkel - Sounds of Silence (recorded 1964-66, released 1966)

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