The 3 Simon & Garfunkel songs Bob Dylan said were great

Bob Dylan was a crucial part of the evolution of songwriting in the early 60s, inspiring musicians from many different genres. Songs didn’t need to fit the typical radio length anymore or be only about love. So everyone who appeared later and expanded those boundaries began to be compared with Dylan.

One of them was Paul Simon, the main songwriter in the successful duo Simon & Garfunkel, whom Dylan respects as a songwriter and once mentioned three of their songs that in his opinion are great.

The 3 Simon & Garfunkel songs Bob Dylan said were great

“America”

“Paul Simon has written a few good songs. I think ‘America’ is a good song,” Bob Dylan said in an interview with Bert Kleinman in 1984 when talking about Simon & Garfunkel. Bob admires Simon as a songwriter and has already said that he is one of the “pre-eminent songwriters of the time.” In his opinion, every song the musician performs has something that can only be found in his performance. “(Paul Simon has) written extraordinary songs, hasn’t he? I consider him one of the pre-eminent songwriters of the times. Every song he does has got a vitality you don’t find elsewhere” Dylan told USA Today in 1999.

Simon admired Bob Dylan but didn’t like being compared to him in the beginning of his career as he told Bob Costas. “(Me) and many other writers of my generation were constantly compared to and measured against Dylan, Lennon and McCartney. But in my case particularly Dylan, because we were people whose words were being examined. I just always felt uncomfortable about it (the beginning). I was always being compared, usually unfavorably to Bob. In fact, he was really the great lyricist of the 60s, he deserved all this praise. (…) Personally he has been actually very nice to me and nice about my work,” he said in 1991.

The first track mentioned by him was released on Simon & Garfunkel’s fourth studio album “Bookends” in 1968. Curiously, the British Progressive Rock band Yes covered the track in 1972, when they had one of their first classic line-ups with Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman, Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Bill Bruford.

“The Boxer”

“‘The Boxer’ is a good song,” Dylan said, but his version of the track didn’t please Paul Simon at all. The legendary musician covered the song on his tenth studio album “Self Portrait”, released in 1970, only a few months after the track was put out by Simon & Garfunkel on their album “Bridge over Troubled Water”.

“I certainly didn’t like his version of ‘The Boxer’ nearly as much as I like the Simon and Garfunkel version. I think that’s one of the best things that we ever did, although I thought the fade-out ending was too long. Aside from that, I like the song a lot, and I like our record of it. Aside from the fact, I was flattered to have Bob Dylan sing one of my songs.”

​​“I usually come in second (to Dylan), and I don’t like coming in second. In the beginning, when we were first signed to Columbia, I really admired Dylan’s work. ‘The Sound of Silence’ wouldn’t have been written if it weren’t for Dylan. But I left that feeling around The Graduate and ‘Mrs Robinson’. They weren’t folky any more,” Paul Simon said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1972.

Curiously, they had the chance to play that track together in 1999. During a co-headlining tour, in which they also played together many other songs, like “Sound of Silence”, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, “I Walk the Line”, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, “Forever Young” and “Not Dark Yet”.

Besides Dylan, The Boxer was also covered over the years by Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris and Bruce Hornsby.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water”

“I think ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ is an excellent song. I mean, I think he’s written a lot of bad songs too, but everybody have bad songs,” Bob Dylan said in the interview with Bert Kleinman. The track was part of their album of the same name released in 1970. It was a No. 1 hit in several countries and was later covered by many other artists. Some of them are Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley.

Curiously, in 1965, a few years before Simon had written the song about Bob Dylan changing his style by adopting the electric guitar. Called “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission)”, which was part of Simon’s solo debut album and then re-recorded by Simon & Garfunkel.

The musician incorporated characteristics that mimicked Dylan’s new electric sound and had a similar vocal style. “Not the same as you and me, he doesn’t dig poetry. He’s so unhip, when you say Dylan. He thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was,” the lyrics say.