‘I never said I was going to retire …’ Paul Simon on disability, drive and the mystery behind his greatest songs

He halted his career after decades of hits, then a dream one night changed everything. From New York to swinging London and apartheid South Africa, he explains his epic journey

As a struggling young singer-songwriter in 1960s Queens, New York, Paul Simon would often retreat to his parents’ bathroom. There, with the tiling giving the room an echo and the sound of running taps generating white noise, he’d sit strumming his guitar in the dark. This experience inspired The Sound of Silence – Simon and Garfunkel’s first US No 1 – and one of pop’s most memorable opening couplets: “Hello darkness my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.”

“The Sound of Silence was the first song I wrote which seemed to come from some place that I didn’t inhabit,” says Simon, now 82, over the phone from the city where he penned it. “At age 23, it was unusual, well beyond my age and abilities. Then it happened again throughout my writing. Bridge Over Troubled Water was another song that came mysteriously. So did a lot of Graceland. I wrote Slip Slidin’ Away in 20 minutes – usually it takes me a couple of months to get a song. There are other examples, like Darling Lorraine, of songs that came from some place else … A mystery, you could call it.”

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