Simon & Garfunkel – The Sound of Silence

1964-66: bathroom draft, then Wilson’s added electric parts

The Sound of Silence began as an acoustic song Paul Simon finished at twenty-one, writing in the bathroom of his parents’ house in Flushing, Queens, lights off, faucet running, because the tiles gave a slight echo and the water made a noise he liked. It appeared quietly on Simon & Garfunkel’s Columbia album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. in 1964, produced by Tom Wilson; the album failed commercially. In 1965 Wilson, without the duo in the room, layered on electric guitar, bass and drums at Columbia’s Studio A in New York and released the new version as a single. By January 1966 it was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100; the album Sounds of Silence followed and turned a shelved folk song into a national radio fact.

Two voices enter with almost no accompaniment on the folk take, close enough to be one instrument; the electric single gives the song a beat the bathroom version only implied. Art Garfunkel’s tenor lifts the melody toward the high notes while Simon’s guitar and the session rhythm section keep a steady pace. The lyric moves through neon and silence, people talking without speaking. Garfunkel has described it on stage as the inability of people to communicate, not only across nations but across a table. Simon has been wary of large readings that hang Kennedy or a whole decade on the song; what he has confirmed is the room, the tap, and the pleasure of playing alone in the dark.

Simon and Garfunkel heard their own future on the radio, arranged by a producer who had not asked. Live they often returned to plain harmony, two voices and a guitar, which is how the song was born and how it still quiets a crowd. The folk audience that loved the quiet record had to accept the drums; the pop audience never heard the bathroom. In Central Park in 1981, and on countless stages since, the first line still quiets a field: Hello, darkness. Length on the hit single sits just over three minutes, long enough for the layered voices and short enough for AM rotation.

Decades of covers, film cues and school choirs have kept using the greeting. The electric single is a compromise that became the classic: a folk song given a drum beat by session players and left to find its public. Underneath, you can still hear the tiled room if you want to. A young man in Queens, water running, playing alone because he liked the dark. The silence in the title is, on Garfunkel’s account, people failing to reach each other, set to a melody that stuck on radio and never quite left the repertoire of quieter American protest songs.