Paul Simon called one of his most cherished songs “a failure of songwriting”

Posted On October 28, 2025October 28, 2025

Looking back through the annals of music history, there are some songwriters who just don’t get the recognition they deserve, and Paul Simon is one of them.

Now, before you pick up your metaphorical pitchforks or light your figurative torches and start to head to the comments to belittle and berate such an idea that Paul Simon, one of the most celebrated songwriters of his age, is not as well-loved as he should be, you have to remember just how talented he is.

Simon traversed from folk icon to pop star in much the same way as Bob Dylan. His expert lyricism also mirrors Dylan, and he certainly supersedes him in terms of overall composition. But I would bet that not one person with a sharp object or live flame in their hand would put Simon above Dylan in the overall songwriter rankings. The reason he should be so well-regarded is that he had impeccably high standards.

Every songwriter tends to have personal standards when sitting down with a composition. Even though it might be easy to rest on one’s laurels, a song is an opportunity for an artist to push themselves outside of their comfort zone to create something beautiful that no one had ever heard. While Paul Simon would continue to innovate as a songwriter throughout his career, one of his most famous hits came from a tune that didn’t measure up to the rest in his mind.

As Simon started his duo act with Art Garfunkel, though, there was a good chance that he didn’t have a shot at the big time at all. Going through the duo’s first few years together, they couldn’t get anyone interested in their folk-tinged pop music, only scoring a hit when a remix of ‘The Sound of Silence’ started to gain airplay in the US, by which time they had already broken up.

Coming together to cut new music, albums like Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme showed Simon and Garfunkel starting to grow as a creative entity, from Simon’s clever wordplay to both singers adding complex arrangements to their songs like ‘Scarborough Fair/Canticle’. While they would continue to create delicate works of art across the album Bookends, Bridge Over Troubled Water marked the moment where their creative partnership began to dwindle.

Since Simon would spend all his time in the studio working through songs, Garfunkel was looking to move outside the music world. Following his dream of balancing his acting career with music, Garfunkel often had strong disagreements about where Simon was taking the music, even nixing some songs that Simon wanted on the album.

Although the tension may have been palpable in the studio, it never came across in the music, with songs like the title track and their version of The Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’ sounding amazing from the first few bars. While the song ‘The Boxer’ would become a staple of the band’s catalogue, Simon always had problems with how he brought the lyrics across.

An avid follower of artists like Bob Dylan, Simon was known to take special care of how he framed every lyric, only for most of the song’s hook to be nothing but ‘lie-lie-lie’. For Simon, this was a huge disappointment compared to his previous efforts, saying: “I thought that ‘lie la lie was a failure of songwriting. I didn’t have any words! Then people said it was ‘lie’, but I didn’t really mean that. That it was a lie…For me, every time I sing that part, I’m a little embarrassed”.

Despite his reservations about the lyrics, Simon would also say that the fans helped him look past his technical foul-ups, thinking that the rest of the song works off of the emotion of the melody rather than the words. Simon would even get high praise from one of his idols in the years following the song’s release.

In truth, the reason he was so guarded about the track is that it was written about him: “I think the song was about me: everybody’s beating me up, and I’m telling you now I’m going to go away if you don’t stop. By that time we had encountered our first criticism. For the first few years, it was just pure praise. It took two or three years for people to realize that we weren’t strange creatures that emerged from England but just two guys from Queens who used to sing rock ‘n’ roll. And maybe we weren’t real folkies at all! Maybe we weren’t even hippies!”

When working on his self-effacing double album Self Portrait, Dylan would eventually do his version of ‘The Boxer’, holding Simon in high esteem as one of his favourite songwriters. While Simon may not have been able to string words together perfectly for this one song, it’s sometimes enough to create a melody that touches people’s hearts without any words.

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