Time Capsule: Paul Simon, The Paul Simon Songbook

At 15, I started “dating” a cute girl who lived two towns over—which, when you don’t have a driver’s license, is practically like living on opposite coasts. All we did was text and send Snapchats to each other, fully embracing how the origins of social media were colliding with the onset of a new and hopeful and terrifying age of being terminally online. We were sketching our digital footprints in real time, drawing pictures of each other and flirting like such small gestures of affection would soon go extinct. She was my #wcw and I was her #mcm and, after getting my first iPhone, I spent a $20 iTunes gift card on my first album: The Paul Simon Songbook. I bought it because of “Kathy’s Song,” which the girl from two towns over and I had declared to be “our song”—which meant we’d send lyrics to each other almost daily, holding the words sacred like wedding vowels. But time back then, it moved like wildfire and, in the stroke of a month that felt like the flash of a day, she ghosted me and started dating my best friend—who was a year older than me and had his license and could mend the gap of distance without a hitch. “I stand alone without beliefs, the only truth I know is you” indeed.

Before I would watch The Graduate and make “plastics” my entire personality sometime in 2014, I found a softened palate of unproblematic folk music in The Paul Simon Songbook. Many of the 12 songs would end up on Simon & Garfunkel records eventually, but they were Paul Simon’s debut darlings first. Recorded and released in between the Simon & Garfunkel albums Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. and Sounds of Silence, The Paul Simon Songbook was Simon’s attempt at recalibrating after the former sold poorly. He made the record at Levy’s on New Bond Street in London, having traveled to Europe frequently to perform at clubs around Paris, Copenhagen and Haarlem. The process of making Songbook was daunting, as he only had a single mic for his voice and guitar, often having to do multiple takes just to get one track right. Simon took two songs from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.—“The Sound of Silence” and “He Was My Brother”—and re-recorded them. It was a messy affair that, against all odds, ended with one of the most saccharine and under-loved folk records of its time.

While The Paul Simon Songbook came out in 1965, it was only initially released in the UK—and it didn’t see a US release until its inclusion in the Paul Simon: Collected Works box set in 1981. Even today, Songbook doesn’t carry the same strong foundation of listeners as Simon’s later work, like Still Crazy After All These Years or Graceland. This was Simon at his rawest, and his potential had not yet been properly discovered. “The Sound of Silence” had not yet become a quiet anthem of an entire generation, as Simon & Garfunkel were, simply, a duo once known as Tom & Jerry and rather unproven. They were not yet titans of the New York folk scene, and Paul Simon was certainly not lauded as one of the best penmans of his era. I am a sucker, though, for a charming introduction, and Songbook is that and more. Tapping into this rendition of “The Sound of Silence,” it’s easy to see that, if the dominos fell differently, Simon very well could have just been another folk singer lost to the sands of time oversaturated by Bob Dylan’s dominance—a realm of forgottenness populated by heads like Fred Neil, Dave Van Ronk, Patrick Sky and Carolyn Hester.

But of course, we know how the story goes. Simon would write a lot of songs while in England in 1964 and 1965, and many of them, like “Homeward Bound” and “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her,” would form his and Art Garfunkel’s breakout record Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme in 1966—which would then crack open the floodgates for the duo on Bookends and “Mrs. Robinson” two years later. The Paul Simon Songbook is the epitome of a stepping stone, as nearly all of its songs have lived stronger lives elsewhere. But still, these songs are beautiful and unkempt and transcendent. It sounds like Paul Simon walked into a studio and sang into the first microphone he found, unbothered about whether anyone else was there to hear or tape him.

On “Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall,” we’re met by the sound of a busker given room to spread out—but he doesn’t put his arms out too far. Simon is a torchbearer of restraint, never overworking the songs for the sake of flamboyancy or genius. It’s just his voice and a guitar, as he toes the line between easy-listening and thought-provoking. “The mirror on my wall casts an image dark and small, but I’m not sure at all it’s my reflection” being a lyric on a singer-songwriter’s debut album still radiates. The glow of Songbook never dims when Simon sings, his language a vibrant stenograph of a mid-20s performer still coming of age yet lilting like a middle-aged troubadour.

And while, yes, you could just go listen to any of Simon & Garfunkel’s five studio albums instead, I can’t help but, nine times out of 10, return to The Paul Simon Songbook. As I’ve grown older, Simon’s barebones rendition of “A Most Peculiar Man” is the curiosity that pulls me back in more and more, as he plucks ever so gently on his guitar and airs out a splendidly tender vocal, singing “He had no friends, he seldom spoke. And no one in turn ever spoke to him, ‘cause he wasn’t friendly and he didn’t care and he wasn’t like them.” A 24-year-old fashioning such a devastating story about a recluse, with such a lived-in concept of mortality in tow, is so fleetingly rare—yet Simon will have you convinced he’s worn out enough lifetimes to have the nuance to proselytize such singular narratives. Likewise, on “I Am A Rock,” Simon has something to say about his emotions and why he’s guarding them. “Don’t talk of love, well I’ve heard the word before,” he sings. “It’s sleeping in my memory, I won’t disturb the slumber of feelings that have died. If I never loved, I never would have cried.” Simon’s voice, though not as conventionally beautiful as Garfunkel’s high-register ascent, is plaintive here, only coiling around a lightened, running prettiness when absolutely necessary.

“Kathy’s Song” is Simon’s first track where he explicitly calls out his then-girlfriend and momentary muse Kathy Chitty (who appears alongside Simon on the album’s cover, as they sit on a cobblestone street in London while holding wooden figurines), whom would inspire the song “America” a few years later. 60 years later, I fear that Simon has failed to write lines as beautiful as “And as I watch the drops of rain weave their weary paths and die, I know that I am like the rain, there but for the grace of you go I.” “Kathy’s Song” features one of Simon’s best guitar performances, a moment of delicate finger-picking that precisely matches the ingenuity of his own singing.

What makes Paul Simon such a quintessential folk singer is, for better or for worse, his ability to not only remain in key and pitch, but his gorgeous and methodical delivery of his own vocabulary. The way his tone briefly warps when he sings “And a song I was writing is left undone, I don’t know why I spend my time writing songs I can’t believe” on “Kathy’s Song” is a masterful display of letting the story continue to unravel through meter and syllable breaks.

A Garfunkel-sung “April Comes She Will” would later appear in The Graduate and endures as the most popular rendition of the track, but Simon’s Songbook performance stands on its own. I often think about how Simon later regretted not singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and it’s fascinating to see his initial take on this track in particular—which was, undoubtedly, made sweeter when his bandmate grabbed the mic a year later. But no one can mess up the “A love once new has now grown old” line, really. Simon’s take is a less ornate bulletin, arriving more filled out than a demo but not quite as emotionally muscular as Garfunkel’s. But what’s truly remarkable, however, is Simon’s rendition of “April Come She Will” is still smart as a whip and wistful. At barely a minute-and-a-half long, it’s formulaic and bulletproof.

The Paul Simon Songbook documents Simon’s first attempts at political songwriting. While “The Sound of Silence,” according to many, alludes to America’s grief after the assassination of JFK, the record does a bang-up job of balancing hymns of heartache with conscious folk stylings that cut through the noise of country-wide and global conflict. On “A Church is Burning,” Simon admonishes KKK cronies who carried out hate crimes on Black churches, singing “Like hands that are praying, the fire is saying ‘You can burn down my churches, but I shall be free.’” He (with Garfunkel) would later rework the lyrics of the anti-war song “The Side of a Hill” into “Canticle,” the counterpoint to “Scarborough Fair” on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. On the Songbook version, Simon sings about the destruction of the Vietnam War, lamenting a “soldier [who] cleans and polishes a gun that ended a life at the age of seven years.” On “He Was My Brother,” Simon mourns a different kind of destruction, citing the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi and the Freedom Riders and how “they shot my brother dead, because he hated what was wrong.”

Armed with only his guitar and a microphone, Simon entering Levy’s to perform “Leaves That Are Green” ought to live on as a crucial mark in music’s long history. The song is a bounty of proto-nostalgia, affixing itself to a lineage of imagery that conjures young adulthood and the ever-changing colors of life. “Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl,” Simon sings. “I held her close, but she faded in the night, like a poem I meant to write.” Here, the leaves change and, like all finite things, crumble. Simon doesn’t hide from goodbyes, though, instead using his own misgivings about growing older and adorning them with fine-tuned hellos. “That’s all there is,” he proclaims. And who are we to not believe him?

While reviewing the album in retrospect for Blender in 2004, critic Robert Christgau disliked The Paul Simon Songbook, awarding it a 2-out-of-5 stars and proclaiming that “[Simon’s] true solo debut, 1972’s Paul Simon, is about 10 times better.” Record Mirror and Rolling Stone felt similarly, leaving 3-out-of-5 star-reviews, with the former writing that the album was full of “appealing and worthwhile folk songs” and that Simon “has a voice of power, of contrast, and of simple musicianship.” Simon himself wasn’t even fond of the album when it was released, explaining that “there are some [songs] I would not write today” in the original liner notes, before professing that they “played a role in the transition” to his place in music at the time.

It’s understandable that anyone would take that stance, given Reginald Warburton and Stanley West’s uninspired production, but there’s a certain level of cynicism on “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission)” that we never got on a Simon & Garfunkel record, especially not when the duo re-recorded the track for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Dismissing The Paul Simon Songbook for what it is—a collection of songs assembled by a gifted songwriter in the wake of the debut album with his singing partner having flopped—is a disservice to how the album, in many ways, resurrected Paul Simon’s ascent, acting as the bridge from a disappointing first outing to a period of great, unparalleled success.

Though The Paul Simon Songbook is, at its core, just a measure of one man with his guitar and damn-near nothing else, it’s a clear-eyed, minimal document of one of our greatest storytellers properly capturing his own voice. “From the moment of my birth to the instant of my death, there are patterns I must follow just as I must breathe each breath,” Simon sings, unknowingly tracing the genesis of a six-decade, 15-album career. It’s the kind of record you might share with a first love, and there’s a level of craftsmanship here that’s rife with flourishes of brilliance. The emotional cord that links each song on Paul Simon’s debut album remains profound and pertinent.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.