Bridge Over Troubled Water

Simon & Garfunkel's 1970 swan song, Bridge Over Troubled Water, was both their most effortless record and their most ambitious.

The duo spent most of the 1960s as a highly regarded folk act distinguished by their intuitive harmonies and Paul Simon's articulate songwriting, yet compared to the Greenwich Village revivalists, whom they tried to emulate on songs like "A Simple Desultory Philippic" and "Bleecker Street", they were pretty square. By Bookends in 1968, they were settling into themselves, losing their folk revival pretensions and emphasizing quirky production techniques to match their soaring vocals. Two years later, Bridge did that album one better by revealing a voracious musical vocabulary that spanned gospel, rock, R&B, and even classical.

As this thoughtful reissue attests, the album sounds unique even 40 years later, driven and defined entirely by their own personal musical and political obsessions.

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Pitchfork
Simon & Garfunkel: Bridge Over Troubled Water Review