The Sound of Silence

Written by Paul Simon, 1963–64

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Paul Simon wrote “The Sound of Silence” in his bathroom — literally. He was 21, and he liked to sit in the dark with the tiled walls acting as an echo chamber and the faucet running, because he found the sound of water soothing. Sitting there in the darkness with his guitar, he wrote the line that opens the song. He began it in November 1963 and spent three months perfecting the words, finishing them on February 19, 1964. There’s a persistent myth that the song was written in response to the Kennedy assassination, since it was recorded three months afterward — but Simon and Garfunkel had already performed it live two months before Dallas.

Art Garfunkel described the song’s subject as people’s inability to reach each other, especially emotionally. But his college roommate, Sandy Greenberg, offered a more personal reading in his memoir: Greenberg had gone suddenly and totally blind as a young man, and Garfunkel — who dropped everything to read textbooks aloud to him and guide him around New York — took to calling himself “Darkness” in solidarity with his friend. To Greenberg, “hello darkness, my old friend” was about that bond.

Then came one of the great accidents in music history. The acoustic version appeared on the duo’s 1964 debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., and it flopped so badly that the pair broke up — Simon went to England, Garfunkel went back to Columbia University. But in 1965, DJs in Boston and Florida started spinning the track anyway. Producer Tom Wilson noticed. So on June 15, 1965, straight after finishing the session for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” he kept the same studio musicians in the room, overdubbed electric guitar, bass and drums onto the old acoustic recording, and released it as a single — without telling Simon or Garfunkel, who were no longer even a working act. It reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending January 1, 1966. The two men reunited in a hurry, and one of the greatest partnerships in American music was saved by a producer who never asked permission.