![]() There’s something terrifying about imagining you and your best friend still so close in fifty years, and something equally frightening about imagining life without them. Not only you, but the people around you too. It is such a strange thing, to be young and to know you’re going to die someday - just in a very long time. Reflecting on mortality without sounding absolutely miserable is no easy task, but thankfully the song manages to feel sincere rather than performative. ‘Overs’ definitely brings an end to the relationship: ‘We’re just a habit / Like saccharin’, concludes Simon, who perhaps takes his first real steps into the adult world by putting an end to a relationship that doesn’t bring anything to either side anymore.Īfter a ‘Voices of Old People’ interlude (which is exactly what the title makes it sound like it is), we make a big jump in time with ‘Old Friends’, the album’s most quietly devastating song. Once we realize that the couple’s search for identity has made them drift apart from one another, there is no turning back. In the span of three and a half minutes, we get surprisingly involved in a journey that ends bitterly. The guitars are decidedly calmer than in the previous song, beautifully accompanying both the euphoric and overwhelming feelings that characterize the search for one’s self. While they’re looking for America, they’re looking for many things - the moments where they find each other seem to answer a question they didn’t even know had been asked. ![]() ‘Laughing on the bus / Playing games with the faces / She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy / I said “Be careful his bowtie is really a camera”’: it is when their childish side comes out that the two young lovers are happiest. The tale of Simon and his girlfriend Kathy’s roadtrip through America lets childhood slip through the cracks more often than once. ‘America’ moves away into adulthood - but only in appearance. Bookends starts with both youth and death, a contradictory duo that is easiest to ignore for most, but that Simon & Garfunkel have decided to confront us with immediately. They may ask themselves ‘what’s becoming of the children’, but no one in the song seems to particularly try to help them. This story of a young boy about to commit public suicide is told at a safe distance the same one that both the newspapers that will talk about the event and the direct witnesses seem to adopt. The song oddly blends happy sounds with a deeply cynical theme. The album opens on ‘Bookends’, a short, quiet instrumental track, immediately counterbalanced by the explosion that is ‘Save the Life of my Child’. We’re lost, but they’re lost too - they’re just a little bit better at expressing it than we are. Their honesty makes Bookends extremely special to listen to. The duo doesn’t pretend to know what it all means, and that’s perfectly fine. This makes the result all the more compelling, a complete production not only of an era, but of life itself and its strangest beats. However, the folk strings that range from frailty to aggressiveness, Simon’s delicate voice, the synthesizers and drums that occasionally make themselves louder - all of these are firmly subordinated to the narrative. Of course, that is not to say that the album does not have its moments of musical euphoria. In Bookends, it is however hard to deny that the narrative is the main star. There is value in both of these approaches, and they can certainly change from album to album. Others may find themselves more drawn to lyricism, to emotion, to feelings. Some find more things to like in the technical side of it, the notes, the chords, the instruments, the genre, the vocal qualities of the singer, the careful dissection of what makes an album great on a musical level. This is an album of reflection, of moments sang in the present that belong to both past and future - and it is through this particular position that it becomes so special.Įveryone has a different approach to music. ![]() Simon, as the main lyricist, sings of life as he knows it, and somehow manages to always sound like an outsider to it at the same time. The album managed to catch a weird, unstable thing that is hard to understand and even harder to put into words: real life. Despite coming out more than half a century ago, Simon & Garfunkel’s fourth studio album is miraculously just as relevant today than it was in 1968. ‘Preserve your memories / They’re all that’s left of you’ it is with these words that the titular theme of Bookends leaves us. ![]()
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