"The Sounds of Silence" is the song that propelled the 1960s
folk music duo Simon and Garfunkel to popularity. It was
written in February 1964 by Paul Simon in the aftermath of the
November 22, 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F.
Kennedy.
The song features Simon on acoustic guitar and both Simon
and Garfunkel singing. It was originally recorded as an
acoustic piece for their first album
Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.but on the initiative of the
record company was later overdubbed with electric instruments
and rereleased as a single in September 1965. The single
reached number one on New Year's Day 1966 and was included in
the 1966 album
Sounds of Silence.
The song was originally called "The
Soundsof Silence" and is titled that way on the early
albums in which it appeared and on the single. In later
compilations it was retitled "The Sound of Silence". Both the
singular and the plural form of the word appear in the lyrics.
In his book
Lyrics 1964–2008Simon has the title in the singular.
Simon began working on the song sometime after the Kennedy
assassination. He had made progress on the music but had yet to
get down the lyrics. On 19 February 1964 the lyrics apparently
coalesced, and Simon showed the new composition to Garfunkel
the same day. Shortly afterward, the duo began to perform it at
folk clubs in New York. They recorded it for the first time on
March 10, and included the track on their debut album,
Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., released that October. The
album flopped upon its release, and the duo split up, with
Simon going to England for much of 1965. There he often
performed the song solo in folk clubs, and recorded it for a
second time on his solo LP in May 1965,
The Paul Simon Songbook.
In the meantime, Simon and Garfunkel's producer at Columbia
Records in New York, Tom Wilson, had learned that the song had
begun to receive airplay on radio stations in Boston,
Massachusetts and around Gainesville and Cocoa Beach,
Florida.
On June 15, 1965, immediately after the recording session of
Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," Wilson took the original
track of Simon & Garfunkel, and overdubbed the recording
with electric guitar (played by Al Gorgoni), electric bass (Bob
Bushnell), and drums (Bobby Gregg), and released it as a single
without even consulting Simon or Garfunkel. For the B-Side
Wilson used an unreleased track he cut with the duo a few
months earlier on which they had tried out a more
"contemporary" sound. "Sounds of Silence"/"We've Got a Groovey
Thing Going" entered the U.S. pop charts in September 1965 and
slowly began its ascent.
Simon learned that it had entered the charts minutes before
he went on stage to perform at a club in Copenhagen, Denmark,
and in the later fall of 1965 he returned to the United States.
By the end of 1965 and the first few weeks of 1966, the song
reached number one on the U.S. charts. Simon and Garfunkel then
reunited as a musical act, and included the song as the title
track of their next album,
Sounds of Silence, hastily recorded in December 1965 and
released in January 1966 to capitalize on their success. The
song propelled them to stardom and, together with two other
top-five (in the U.S.) hits in the summer of 1966, "I Am a
Rock" and "Homeward Bound," ensured the duo's fame. In 1999,
BMI named "The Sounds of Silence" as the 18th-most performed
song of the 20th century. In 2004 it was ranked #156 on
Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All
Time, one of the duo's three songs on the list.
The original acoustic stereo mix of the song had the duo's
vocals on separate channels, spotlighting the delicate
harmonies. When the 'rock' version was mixed to stereo, Wilson
mixed the vocals in the middle, which is not as clear sounding
as the original acoustic version.
On the duo's 1968 album
Bookends, the track "Save the Life of My Child" features
a distorted sample of Art Garfunkel's "
Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to talk with
you" line from the original recording of "The Sounds Of
Silence"). At 2:16 in the song somebody says "echo me"
In 2009, the song was released (along with "I Am a Rock") as
a downloadable track for rhythm video game Rock Band 2
"The Sounds of Silence" was released on Columbia Records as
45 rpm catalog number #4-43396. The single has several
variations:
The song was used three times in the film
The Graduate, played during the opening credits and the
closing footage, and in the film
Bobby, where it is played during Robert Kennedy's
victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel, just before his
assassination. It can also be heard in the last episodes of the
Japanese dorama
Taiyo to Umi no Kyoshitsu. It can also be heard in the
comedy film
Old Schoolwhen Will Ferrell gets shot with a
tranquilizer dart and falls into the pool going into a dream
daze. Additionally, the song is played in the film
Kingpin, following sexual activity between protagonist
Roy Munson and his landlady. In the film
More American Graffiti, the 1966 recording is heard
playing after a rather large bar fight. In 2009's
Watchmenthe song is featured on the soundtrack for the
film and used during The Comedian's funeral.