1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 118. Simon and Garfunkel – Bookends (1968)

Paul and Art give us what we expect from them. There are some well-known tracks on here – America, Mrs Robinson, A Hazy Shade of Winter, and The Zoo. America once again shows Paul Simon’s combination of hope and melancholy, the young lovers taking a long-distance bus ride and laughing and joking, but then the singer also feels a sense of alienation (I’ve always assumed it was at a point in the journey where Kathy and everybody else on the bus is asleep, and he’s watching empty lands pass by in darkness).

This track is followed by one called Overs, in which a couple have “laughed all of their laughs”, and it kind of feels like it is Kathy and the narrator from the last track, stuck in later life. I wish that I hadn’t looked this album up before listening (I normally research after listening to avoid prejudice), because I now don’t know if I would have spotted that the first half (doesn’t work to call it “Side 1” when streaming) between the Bookends tracks tells of stages of a life – Save The Life of my Baby (with its heavy use of the Moog), America, Overs, Old Friends (about two old friends sat on a park bench). It’s not exactly Shakespeare’s Seven Stages of Man, so maybe I would have missed it.

“Side 2” is more just a smorgasbord of tracks made for The Graduate and some other stuff that Paul Simon was working on before hitting a dry period, and hit the typical Simon and Garfunkel topical beats of alienation (Hazy Shade of Winter), satirical views of American life (Mrs Robinson) and wry observations of humanity (The Zoo).

Somehow not as good as Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, I think. The good tracks are stronger, the weaker tracks are weaker. Perhaps because of Simon’s writers’ block.