26 January : All The Love That I Hold Inside

How do I begin to assess an album regarded as a stone-cold classic? An album full of songs I learned to play guitar with all those years ago?

Bridge Over Troubled Water, released 26 January 1970 in the US, 6 February in the UK,  is another album I’ve had for so long I can barely remember not having it, and another I haven’t actually listened to for a long time. I was nervous about listening again, to be honest, in case it didn’t stack up to my memory.  In fact, what happened was that I remembered all of the things I liked about the record and was reminded of the things I didn’t.

Bridge Over Troubled Water, like Abbey Road, is the sound of a partnership separating. Partly that’s something that’s obvious in retrospect, but the clues are there in the songs too. It was a big deal–in the late sixties Simon and Garfunkle were outselling Bob Dylan by a long way.

Bridge Over Troubled Water is also an album created under the guidance of a talented producer, Roy Halee, just as Abbey Road was as much a production of George Martin and the Abbey Road studio as of John, Paul, George and Ringo. Halee’s production is much more intrusive, though, especially the extensive use of echo and crashing percussion. This annoyed me on a first relisten, though not so much on the second, except at its most egregious.

Leaving that aside, the first thing that struck me on relistening, and had never occurred to me before, is the bravery of opening with the title track, a song so strong that Simon knew when he was writing it that it was a major step forward for him as a songwriter. He wasn’t to know then that within the year it would be covered by Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin and thereafter by just about anyone else of note.

It’s a song that builds, deliberately, from an opening that is Larry Knechtel’s piano and Art Garfunkle’s voice. It’s so easy to focus on the beauty of the singing that you miss Knechtel’s nuanced arrangement, his choice of passing chords and progressions. As the song moves through the verses the intensity builds and ripens until it is, in my view, somewhat over-ripe, but notwithstanding that you then have a massive problem: follow that!

You follow it with a change of pace and tone as we’re straight into El Condor Pasa and a series of great songs. Listening now, of the eleven songs on the album there are only two that I’d rather weren’t there: Cecilia and the version of Bye Bye Love, the former because it is irritating, the latter because of the over-intrusive crowd noise of the live recording (it’s real, but sounds fake). But for the rest, what songs they are. The best known, probably, is The Boxer which, despite Gordon Coxhill’s comment in NME, is one of Simon’s most popular, and grabs you from Fred Carter jnr’s tumbling intro on (despite the intrusive string arrangement). But there’s also the nylon-strung bossa nova So Long Frank Lloyd Wright with its odd little melody; the glorious Only Living Boy In New York; and Song For the Asking, with its Beatles-ish cello.

And here’s the thing: all three of those songs, So Long Frank Lloyd Wright , The Only Living Boy In New York and Song For the Asking are love songs by Paul Simon to Art Garfunkle as their partnership draws to an end, remembering laughter and all the nights they harmonised ’til dawn, letting Artie free to go make movies because he’s eager to fly, making it clear that Paul’s acknowledging his own faults and is still there to play all the love he holds inside.

Richard Williams’s review in Melody Maker is interesting in the comparison it makes to Bookends (1968). I’m not sure that I agree with his assessment, but I recognise it as valid and get where its’s coming from. Bookends is a neglected album that deserves more attention to its quiet melancholy and beauty, and almost avant garde stylings and cinematic strings. In that sense there’s a case that Bookends is the better collection. Bridge Over Troubled Water is more conventional, but its strength is the songs.

To finish on the title song, there’s an interesting background piece on the BBC website that notes

What distinguishes the song from most of its descendants is the forgotten political context revealed in Songs of America. It was a song written when the brightest promises of the 1960s were turning to ash, by a sensitive, Nixon-hating liberal who found himself trying to fill a God-shaped hole.

One of Simon’s great strengths as a writer is that he is rarely didactic; he prefers to tell stories and let you pick out resonances if you’re so inclined. This is a powerful approach, and it’s why his best songs survive and thrive, but it also means that the context for the work can be forgotten.

Was my nervousness about listening again justified? No. It’s true that the production style grates now and then, especially on headphones, but you can’t knock the quality of the material: It remains a great album.

Do I really need to link to it? It’s on Spotify.