What I Learned Recording a Simon & Garfunkel Tribute Album

In the late 1970s, my family spent a year traveling from our East Coast home to the Pacific Northwest and back by car. I didn’t realize at the time what a gift my parents had given us with these long trips. We’d set off on these journeys to look for America, and to affordably travel to various places out west for my father’s work. Vast horizons were visible from our Chevy station wagon. Plains, corn fields, immense mountains, dusty little towns, motorcycle gangs, lakes, the frozen Mississippi River all zoomed by the window. During these days on the road, I’d wait impatiently for my turn to pick a cassette tape from the suitcase-like box in the front seat. We’d all sit and watch the world wiz by listening.  

Held captive in that Chevy I developed an intimate awareness of the soundscapes inside records by the Beatles (and their off-shoot solo careers), the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Peter Paul & Mary, Janis Jopin, Judy Collins, Chubby Checker, Elvis, Buddy Holly and many others from the 50s and 60s. One album that jumped out was Joan Baez’s Any Day Now album of Bob Dylan songs. I thought it curious that one singer would record a double album of songs by another singer. What also grabbed my attention every time was Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, the lyrics of which, sung in angelic harmony, seemed to match the experience of our travels. References to the New Jersey turnpike, Pittsburgh, being homeward bound, the drizzle of the rain on the car window, the loneliness and boredom, all captured in the vast lyrical milieu of Paul Simon’s songs. They imprinted upon the mind of 9-year-old me, a poetry that I would not have heard without these trips. 

40 years later, I found myself captive again. Instead of seatbelted inside of a Chevy rolling across America, I was confined to a Brooklyn apartment during the pandemic lockdown. Instead of beautiful landscapes flowing by the window, our eyes were stabbed by the flashing lights of ambulances with sirens carrying the dying to the hospital down the street. Like I had my whole life, I sought escape and remove through the comfort of music. 

Having developed as a multi-instrumentalist throughout my life, I am able to focus for hours or days at a time and produce songs in my own home studio using guitars, drums, bass, keyboards, etc to multi-track songs into existence. During Covid, I got into a real creative flow writing and recording a mini-album of songs i wrote about the surreal experience of lock-down in New York. My brother Mark, a successful and talented musician who fronts a couple well known NYC tribute bands, added vocals to some of my songs. I reconnected with my high school rock band and we remotely recorded a different record of new and original songs, which we released.

It felt life affirming during the lockdown period to create music again. My energies seemed boundless, urgent and highly focused. Aside from releasing new material, I mixed and mastered four records from my 90s band Poolsville for digital re-release. One day, as a challenge to myself, I decided to record a cover version of the song I Am A Rock by Simon & Garfunkel, layering guitars, organ, bass and drum parts into a tightly focused tribute. It seemed an appropriate song considering the circumstances. “An island never cries…” Pleased with the results, I recorded a few more tracks by the folk duo. But at a certain point, my focus on that exercise waned and I put that idea on the digital shelf as life entered its new normal.

One thing I’ve noticed of many of my talented musician friends who have found a home in the artist tribute circuit, is that the rigor of performing tributes has grown their skills while also connecting with built-in audiences. There is a real market for live music connection and tribute performances really achieves that. There still exists a hunger for good live music that is performed locally. There are also prevailing market pressures directing local venues and musicians toward shows with a predictable audience draw. I have always viewed myself as more of a songwriter and creator and an outsider to this trend. There are undeniable advantages to this route considering the economics of venues and the collapse of revenues for recordings. But it’s a path I hadn’t pursued. After an active performance life in the 1990s in New York, I hardly pursue it now unless it is to workshop new songs I’ve written, songs that voices rarely if ever share.

The growing tribute market has created more sustainable audience engagement and economies for local musicians and venues. Tribute platforms also enable talented people to continue to hone their skills. I’ve seen some absolutely incredible performances by tribute acts over the years. I appreciate how learning within the confines of a legend’s sound improves a musician. Social media covers by guitarists, drummers, bassists, fill my algorithm feed. I experience joy and delight watching young musicians, particularly young female musicians, kicking ass and doing incredible work recreating iconic guitar or drum parts. These tribute stars are often original creators as well and tt makes me believe that we have entered a new renaissance era for rock musicianship, where tributes have morphed into a new type of vital classical performance. 

In November 2023, I dusted off those Simon & Garfunkel recordings from lockdown and found there was something worth revisiting. I recorded a couple more songs. They turned out, if not great, at least interesting. I tried a few more and realized I was most of the way to a 10 song album. By this point, I started sharing some of my semi-mixed tracks with friends. Soon suggestions started to float my way in conversation. “What about Hazy Shade of Winter?” or “What about Only Living Boy in New York?” to give a few examples.

The track list started to stack up. I studied the original recordings. Learned various instrument parts from YouTube videos. When in my upstate New York home on weekends, I would disappear into my studio room with my equipment for eight to ten hours at a time. When I’d emerge for air, my wife would remark that I was like a “hot baby” having worked up a glean of sweat in my childlike state of wonder and exploration. 

Throughout 2024, I stopped listening to other music except Simon & Garfunkel. And then only my own recordings. Listening, mixing and remixing my own performances became my biggest challenge. It became an obsession. I spent hundreds of hours recording and mixing, and in some cases, re-recording versions of songs. To my surprise, the acoustic songs were the hardest. I must have four different versions of Kathy's Song and For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her on hard drives, finally settling on versions that I felt at least slightly happy with. Other more heavily produced songs, such as At The Zoo, Fakin’ It or Cecilia, I’d bang out in marathon sessions of 6-10 hours. In other words, the project took on a life of its own, and it took over my own life at the same time.

I never set out with the goal of recording this many Simon & Garfunkel songs. In the end I recorded 32 of them, nearly 60 percent of their entire catalog! I played every instrument and sang every part, with a couple rare exceptions. Some songs had only two or three tracks. Some had over forty. At times, my obsession brought about biblical Noah’s Ark-level delusion. I began feeling anxiety that if I didn’t add a particular song onto the collection, if I left it behind, that I’d lose the opportunity to ‘preserve the memory’ of that song. It was as if the act of performing and recording all of the parts myself was akin to keeping the songs and memories attached to them alive within myself. 

That’s how deep I got. 

What I have learned through recording a tribute album is that inhabiting the sound of another artist has transformed me musically. There is a certain proprietary that takes hold after living in someone else’s music so completely. I suspect this feeling is something shared among tribute musicians. Some songs I made my own in terms of arrangement and sound. Some, to the best of my ability, I tried to recreate the original recordings. Sounds of Silence, I Am A Rock, Only Living Boy in New York, Mrs. Robinson, America – these songs I could not bring myself to rearrange. Recreating them with my own voice and hands – and these recordings are very handmade and imperfect – was the best tribute I could pay. What remains to be seen is whether I have lost some of my writing inspiration in the process, something I always feared by focusing on someone else’s music. 

Obviously, I am not a one-person Wrecking Crew - the famous group of L.A. session musicians who played on most of the duo’s original recordings, but I think I’ve made good work of some of these parts, particularly in the drumming department. Hal Blaine continues to be a major inspiration. Nor am I as proficient on guitar as Paul Simon was, especially acoustic, but I’ve picked up enough hours travis picking to feel comfortable performing it. And I am most definitely not gifted in the vocal department like Art Garfunkel, but I do think this is the best singing I’ve been able to capture on tape. I am just a musically inclined person who loves these songs and the memories that I have attached to them. I’ve attempted to render them respectfully with my heart voices and body.

I view Preserve Your Memories more like a handmade personal playlist of my favorite Simon & Garfunkel songs. Back in the 1980s, before digital playlisting, me and my friends would record mixtapes on cassettes, curating songs for each other and for our romantic crushes. In the future, perhaps not only will we sequence our favorite songs into a playlist, but we’ll perform and record them as well. The tribute record becomes like another evolution of the mixtape. I wholeheartedly invite others to explore this path if they haven’t already. There is a long history of tribute or cover records, but some more recent examples that inspired me include Blonde on the Tracks by Emma Swift and Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out. 

“Time it was and what a time it was, it was,” Simon wrote in his song Bookends, a delicate and melancholy meditation on time. Devoting myself to this project I have re-lived and reconnected with those youthful times of innocence when I was unsure of my place in the world, when connection with others seemed illusive, but the flame of hope and future possibility flickered through discovery and growth. Now my hope is that this somewhat extreme journey through recording much of Simon & Garfunkel’s catalog may entertain and inspire others to preserve their memories by recording their own tribute collections. At the end of Bookends, Simon alludes to this theme: music recordings, like photographs and memories, may be all that’s left you. May they always be a blessing.