And it speaks this way:Īnd the vision that was planted in my brainįrom the very first verses, what is the main theme of the track is addressed: incommunicability. Instead, the silence that Paul Simon thought on that February day years ago is far more terrible and inhumane.
Joking aside, however one understands it, silence has a voice: it can be a sweet whisper, like when one embraces a long-sought solitude or he can cry out, if being alone is a curse from which one cannot break free. “The sound of silence” is one of them, and it’s safe to bet that someone who suffers from tinnitus would be ready to confirm it. But it can happen, at times, that this contrast exposes a perfectly sensible expression, an image that is difficult to evoke otherwise. This rhetorical figure, always loved by poets, consists in the juxtaposition of two or more words that normally deny each other. Simon is fond of oxymorons Garfunkel himself explains it, and he knows him well. It is curious, however, how over time the acoustic version has remained the best known and most touching, reaching its highest point in the 1981 free concert in Central Park, when the two musicians, divided for years, returned together to astonish a crowd of 500,000 people.
Simon and Garfunkel reunite and the rest is history. Without letting the duo know, Wilson reinvents it with the addition of drums and electric guitar, transforming it into a folk rock piece that will soon climb the charts. Then the unexpected happens: Tom Wilson, the producer of the record company, discovers that the radios are playing the song with an unexpected frequency in some parts of the United States. The duo splits: Simon leaves for London to seek his fortune as a soloist, while Garfunkel resumes his university studies. It could have also been the last, because it turned out to be a daunting flop. The song, which originally was named The Sounds of Silence, was initially recorded as an acoustic piece and included on Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., the first album Simon records with Art Garfunkel for Columbia Records. He, locked in the bathroom with pen and paper, cannot imagine that in 2020s we would still talk about his dialogue with the most intimate part of himself, opened by one of the most beautiful opening words ever written. A waste that we forgive, because starting from these ingredients the young Paul Simon wrote The Sound of Silence, a song that more than half a century later will still be sadly valid today. Meanwhile, a jet of water flows from a tap deliberately left open.
A confession in the dark, a longtime faithful friend.
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