Paul Simon
The Paul Simon Songbook

This is a curious entry in Paul Simon’s discography: his first solo album, presented in an acoustic, bare-bones, and minimalist edition, as dictated by the rules of the folk revival of those years. It was quietly released in England in 1965 (where the young Simon had moved in search of a turning point in his career) and only fifteen years later was it revisited in the United States, once success was already assured.

And yet, his songwriting voice is already mature: the themes revolve around solitude and the kind of personal and emotional self-isolation typical of contemporary New York singer-songwriters, fueling tracks like «Leaves That Are Green»; «A Most Peculiar Man» and the closing «Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall» and «Patterns» as well as the more famous «I Am A Rock»; «Leaves That Are Green» and the early masterpiece «The Sound Of Silence».

There is also the intense «He Was My Brother»—dedicated to the memory of his friend Andrew Goodman, an anti-racist political activist—and the delicate «Kathy’s Song», a tender ballad inspired by his muse of those English days: she—Kathy Chitty—is in fact the girl depicted on the cover alongside Simon.

Considering that virtually all these tracks would later be revisited, refined, and made “digestible” for the mainstream audience in various subsequent albums in collaboration with Art Garfunkel, the real interest of this album (it’s worth noting that, essential though the production may be, it is certainly not a simple collection of demo versions!) lies in the compositional quality of a twenty-four-year-old Simon and in the clarity of his beautiful voice as a performer, which in the course of his career would end up being somewhat overshadowed and masked by his partner’s near-falsetto.

All lovely songs that wink at the most sophisticated pop, with some of them possessing great potential. While the obvious highlight here is «The Sound Of Silence», the least interesting track to me would be «A Simple Desultory Philippic», which pays a sarcastic tribute to Bob Dylan’s "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and essentially comes down to an entertaining tongue-twister.

The cover features the already mentioned beautiful photo of Paul & Kathy as a young couple, and on the back there are some explanatory notes about the songs by Paul Simon himself. The album, therefore, is clearly not essential, but is recommended for those passionate about the history of American music in the sixties and seventies.