Simon's musical career has spanned over six decades. He is widely regarded as one of the most acclaimed songwriters in popular music history.
Simon formed the duo Simon & Garfunkel with his schoolfriend Art Garfunkel in 1956. They released five studio albums and became one of the most acclaimed groups of the 1960s.
Simon composed nearly all of their songs, including The Sound of Silence, Mrs. Robinson, America, Bridge over Troubled Water, and The Boxer.
After Simon & Garfunkel split in 1970, Simon recorded three acclaimed albums over the following five years, all of which charted in the top 5 on the Billboard 200. His 1972 self-titled album contained the hit songs Mother and Child Reunion and Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.
The 1975 album Still Crazy After All These Years, which featured guest vocals from Garfunkel, was his first number-one solo album, and featured the number 1 hit single 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, among other top-40 songs such as Still Crazy After All These Years, Gone at Last, and My Little Town.
Simon reunited with Garfunkel for a performance in New York Central Park in 1981, drawing half a million spectators, followed by a world tour with Garfunkel.
After a career slump, Simon released Graceland, an album inspired by South African township music, which sold 14 million copies worldwide and remains his most popular and acclaimed solo work.
A number of hit singles were released from the album, including You Can Call Me Al, The Boy in the Bubble, and Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes. It won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1987.
Simon continued to tour throughout the 1990s, wrote a Broadway musical, The Capeman, and recorded a companion album, Songs from The Capeman which was released in 1997. His 2000 album You're the One was nominated again for Album of the Year honours.
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He followed that album up with several years of touring, including another reunion tour with Garfunkel, and released Surprise, his last album of the decade, in 2006.
In 2016, he released Stranger to Stranger, which debuted at number 3 on the Billboard Album Chart and number 1 in the UK Albums Chart, and marked his greatest commercial and critical success in thirty years. His most recent album is 2018's In the Blue Light, which contains re-arrangements of lesser-known songs from his prior albums.
Simon has earned sixteen Grammy Awards for his solo and collaborative work, including three for Album of the Year (Bridge Over Troubled Water, Still Crazy After All These Years, and Graceland), and a Lifetime Achievement Award.
He is a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: first in 1990 as a member of Simon & Garfunkel and again in 2001 for his solo career.
In 2006, he was selected as one of the 100 People Who Shaped the World by Time.
In 2011, Rolling Stone named Simon one of the 100 greatest guitarists, and in 2015 he was ranked eighth in their list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.
Simon was the first recipient of the Library of Congress's Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007.
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Simon was born on October 13, 1941, in Newark, New Jersey, to Hungarian-Jewish parents. His father, Louis (1916–1995), was a college professor, double-bass player, and dance bandleader who performed under the name Lee Sims. His mother, Belle (1910–2007), was an elementary-school teacher. In 1945, his family moved to the Kew Gardens Hills section of Flushing, Queens, in New York City.
Simon's musical career began after meeting Art Garfunkel when they were both 11. They performed in a production of Alice in Wonderland for their sixth-grade graduation, and began singing together when they were 13, occasionally performing at school dances.
Between 1957 and 1964, Simon wrote, recorded and released more than 30 songs, occasionally reuniting with Garfunkel as Tom & Jerry for some singles, including Our Song and That's My Story.
In early 1964, Simon and Garfunkel got an audition with Columbia Records, whose executive Clive Davis signed them to produce an album. Columbia decided that the two would be called Simon & Garfunkel instead of Tom & Jerry. According to Simon, this was the first time artists' surnames had been used in pop music without their first names.
Simon and Garfunkel's first LP, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., was released on October 19, 1964, with 12 songs, five of which were written by Simon. The album initially flopped.
Back on the American East Coast, radio stations began receiving requests for the Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. track The Sound of Silence.
Simon & Garfunkel's producer, Tom Wilson, overdubbed the track with electric guitar, bass guitar and drums, releasing it as a single that eventually went to No. 1 on the U.S. pop charts. Wilson did not inform the duo of his plan, and Simon was horrified when he first heard it.
The success of The Sound of Silence drew Simon back to the United States to reunite with Garfunkel. Together they recorded four more albums: Sounds of Silence; Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme; Bookends; and the hugely successful Bridge over Troubled Water.
Simon and Garfunkel also contributed extensively to the soundtrack of the Mike Nichols film The Graduate (1967), starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. While writing Mrs. Robinson, Simon originally toyed with the title Mrs. Roosevelt. When Garfunkel reported this indecision over the song's name to the director, Nichols replied, Don't be ridiculous! We're making a film here! It's Mrs. Robinson!
After Simon and Garfunkel split in 1970, Simon began writing and recording solo material again. His album Paul Simon was released in January 1972, preceded by his first experiment with world music, the Jamaican-inspired Mother and Child Reunion".
Simon's next project was the pop-folk album, There Goes Rhymin' Simon, released in May 1973.
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Highly anticipated, Still Crazy After All These Years was his next album.
Simon released Hearts and Bones in 1983.
At age 45, Simon found himself back at the forefront of popular music.
On March 4, 1992, he appeared on his own episode of MTV Unplugged, offering renditions of many of his most famous compositions.
After Unplugged, Simon's place in the forefront of popular music dropped notably. A Simon & Garfunkel reunion took place in September 1993, and in another attempt to capitalize on the occasion, Columbia released Paul Simon 1964/1993 in September, a three-disc compilation that received a reduced version on the two-disc album The Paul Simon Anthology one month later.
After living in Montauk, New York, for many years, Simon relocated to New Canaan, Connecticut.
Simon's album So Beautiful or So What was released on the Concord Music Group label on April 12, 2011. The album received high marks from the artist, It's the best work I've done in 20 years. It was reported that Simon attempted to have Bob Dylan guest on the album.
On June 3, 2016, Simon released his thirteenth solo studio album, Stranger to Stranger via Concord Records.
On September 7, 2018, Simon released his fourteenth album, In the Blue Light, consisting of re-recordings of select lesser-known songs from his catalogue, often altering their original arrangements, harmonic structures, and lyrics.
On March 31, 2021, Simon sold his music publishing catalogue to Sony Music Publishing. Simon was previously signed to Universal Music Publishing Group.
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and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.
Paul Simon
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