Simon and Garfunkel

The 'simgar' mailing list of yahoogroups contains lots of valuable info for Simon and Garfunkel fans. The other day someone posted a link to a recent interview at npr.org. As if the song itself was not sufficient, the interviewer came up with 'Tell us something about The Sound of Silence....' What more do you need? Well, Paul was patient and considerate in his reply, and after listening to what he said, I realized that the 'something more' was really needed. Paul Simon: "I wrote it when I was 21 years old, I wrote it in the bathroom of our house in Queens, with the lights off and the water running. That was the atmosphere that I liked." Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again, Because a vision softly creeping, Left its seeds while I was sleeping, And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of silence. Another excerpt from the interview: Paul Simon on hearing one of his songs in an unlikely place. Paul Simon: "I was on a trip down the Amazon river, and we stopped in the middle of nowhere at a tiny little Indian village. Now we were walking around the village and a girl was sitting in a room with no windows. And she was playing the guitar. So we stopped to listen, and I said, I know a song that you know, and I played El Condor Pasa. She knew it and she sang it in Spanish, of course. And then I said, you play a song, and she played The Sound of Silence. It was impossible to explain.... we didnt speak the same language. We were communicating by guitar.... and anyway, just the shock of it..... "