This post is the second in what will be a very occasional series (the first such having been contrived back in March 2014 on the subject of The Who’s ‘See Me, Feel Me‘!) on fleeting moments of musical genius.
When I heard a short while back that Paul Simon was about to retire from touring at the conclusion of his current expedition I realised that – though I am an enormous fan of the man – I have never seen him perform live. I was, fortunately, able to acquire tickets for the Vancouver concert in May and thus to avail myself of an opportunity to rectify this anomaly before it is too late.
Now – few would deny that Simon is a songwriting genius. As I have pointed out previously, a lyricist who can use words such as ‘misconstrued’ and ‘pertains’ or phrases such as ‘doggedly determined’ and ‘arc of a love affair’ without coming over as precious, is quite clearly walking a considerably better walk than are the rest of us.
In this instance, however, the subject is not the lyrics. As was the case with The Who’s perfect palimpsest this post concerns a musical moment, one which occurs in that quintessential Paul Simon solo contribution to the ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water‘ album – ‘The Only Living Boy in New York‘ – a song written in reaction to Simon’s being left alone in New York on the occasion of Art Garfunkel’s trip to Mexico for his acting role in the filming of Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22‘.
The song is a magnificently wistful meditation on Simon’s solitary state, greatly enhanced by the gorgeously sinuous bass playing of the great Joe Osborn. Two verses in it hauls itself into the first of two vocal renditions of one of Simon’s brief but typically splendid tension-raising bridges. As it cascades back into the verse Simon’s solo voice is replaced with a distant ethereal choir which matches – wordlessly – the delicate acoustic guitar chords that give structure to the song. For the third line of the verse the ‘aaahs’ sweetly follow the descending bass figure, pausing momentarily before swelling into the final cadence with a heart-tugging “Here I am” that makes the hairs stand up on the back of this jaded hack’s neck.
The empyreal choir (actually Simon and Garfunkel themselves tracked a dozen or more times) reprises its verse twice more in the playout to the song – each time with a little greater intensity and drowning a little deeper in reverb. This delicious effect was achieved by recording the harmonies actually inside the echo chamber at Columbia’s LA studio.
For those who must know such things I believe that the harmonic progression for the phrase concerned can be annotated thus:
|Emaj7 Emaj9|B Abm7#5/E|
Pure magic!
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