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Sounds of Silence
Simon & Garfunkel · 1966 · Track 1
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The story behind
The first time The Sound of Silence played on a Boston radio station, no one expected that acoustic song recorded in a New York studio would top charts on two continents. The track was born in Paul Simon’s bathroom, where the echo of the tiles and the sound of running water gave it that mysterious air that would later spill through speakers worldwide. Recorded in March 1964 with clean guitars and clean vocals, the original version convinced almost no one: the album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. sold so poorly that the duo split before the year ended. But three months after Kennedy’s assassination, when the airwaves began playing it without permission, someone at Columbia Records decided it deserved another chance.
In June 1965, producer Tom Wilson — the same man then guiding Bob Dylan toward rock — added electric guitars, bass, and drums without telling the musicians. The new mix launched in September that year, just as the song was already playing in Florida for reasons no one quite understood. On January 1, 1966, The Sound of Silence reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, displacing We Can Work It Out by The Beatles. The success forced Simon & Garfunkel to reunite and record their second album, which Columbia titled Sounds of Silence to ride the wave. The song later appeared in the soundtrack of The Graduate (1967) and, years afterward, in compilations like Greatest Hits (1972). In Europe and Oceania, it also climbed to the top spots, though no one ever fully explained why a song written in a Queens bathroom ended up being so universal.