I can't get over how this was recorded 50 years ago, and yet somehow the audio fidelity, and production sounds far better than anything made today - with all of todays technology!
One of the best songs I have ever heard. And I am not American. And I am no longer young. But the truth of this song has screamed at me from the first time I heard it.
Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together
I've got some real estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America
Kathy , I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America
Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, be careful, his bowtie is really a camera
Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat
We smoked the last one an hour ago
So I looked at the scenery
She read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field
Kathy, I'm lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping
And I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America
I refuse to believe this song is real. It has to be a figment of my imagination. Such beautiful music like that should not exist. I CAN'T EVEN, IT'S TOO GOOD
In the 1960s, i discovered Simon and Garfunkel, as a kid who wasn't supposed to be listening to such "hip" stuff. In 1983, i set off on cross-country a road trip to discover America's blue highways with Cathie, my friend and my obsession, only to discover that Simon and Garfunkel had already paved the way. And then, fast forward to January 2019, listening to the Bookends album for the first time in decades on tinny airline earphones, as i touched down in a strange land, only to find the music was as powerful there and then as it had been over half a century earlier. Some things never change, when everything around them does...