Simon & Garfunkel

They were two kids from Queens who had known each other since grade school, and the thing that made them was never just the harmony, though the harmony is the thing people remember first. One of them, Paul Simon, wrote. He wrote constantly, restlessly, with a craftsman’s discomfort about whether anything was good enough. The other, Art Garfunkel, had a voice that could carry Simon’s words somewhere Simon’s own voice could not reach. That tension, the writer who doubted and the singer who soared, is the whole story of the duo, including the parts where it fell apart.

Their first real record went nowhere. They split. What pulled them back together was not a plan or a reunion. It was a decision someone else made about one of their old songs, without asking either of them, and the strange second life it gave a thing they had already buried. They came back, made a run of records that defined a decade for a lot of people, and then split again, this time more or less for good.

What stays is the gap between how small they sometimes thought their songs were and how large those songs turned out to be in other people’s lives. They were rarely the best judges of their own work. That is part of what makes them worth diving into.