At the Zoo

This song began as a musical nod to New York City, but ended up being much more than that. Paul Simon wrote it with a rhythm that shifts between the playful and the reflective, as if the trip to the zoo it describes had its own ups and downs. It begins in A Major, but soon drops a key to G Major, giving the impression that the narrator—and the listener—are adapting to the place they’ve arrived at. The lyrics play with images of anthropomorphized animals: a lion who looks like a politician, a monkey smoking a pipe, a bear complaining about traffic. It’s not just a list of species, but an ironic look at how humans project their own quirks onto the world around them.

They recorded it in January 1967, in sessions that lasted less than a day, and within a month it was already on the radio. In February, it was released as a single, with “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” on the B-side, and in less than three months it climbed to number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. Critics at the time praised it for its witty lyrics and rhythmic structure, with publications like Cash Box calling it “upbeat and catchy” and Record World describing it as “strange but full of energy.” Although it was composed for a scene at the San Francisco Zoo in *The Graduate*, the film never used it. Later, in the 1970s, it was licensed to promote zoos such as the Bronx Zoo and the Oregon Zoo, giving it a second life outside the album. There’s even an alternate version on a bootleg, where the lyrics completely abandon the animal theme and tell the story of a musician who returns home to find that his partner has changed.