Columbia Records made the decision without asking anyone. On June 15, 1965, producer Tom Wilson sat down at Columbia's Studio A on Seventh Avenue in New York City and overdubbed electric guitars, bass, and drums onto an acoustic track that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had recorded the previous year. The musicians were Al Gorgoni and Vinnie Bell on guitar, Joe Mack on bass, and Bobby Gregg on drums. Simon and Garfunkel were not in the room. They were not consulted. They did not find out until after the single was released in September 1965. The record that would define their career, and give its name to their second album, was made without them.
That is the founding condition of "Sounds of Silence," released on January 17, 1966. It is a record born from an act of institutional presumption, and yet it holds together as something genuine. The tension between those two facts is what makes it worth listening to closely, sixty years on.
When Wilson made his move, Simon was performing solo in England and Garfunkel was attending graduate school. Their debut album, "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.," released in October 1964, had sold roughly two thousand copies and gone nowhere. The duo had split. Wilson, who had been tracking the acoustic version of "The Sound of Silence" gaining airplay at radio stations in Boston and throughout Florida, decided the folk-rock moment was ripe. He had just finished producing Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" that same afternoon. He applied the same instinct to Simon and Garfunkel's track: add electricity, release it, see what happens.
What happened was that the overdubbed single hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending January 1, 1966. Simon came back from England. Garfunkel left his studies. Columbia, eager to capitalize, pushed them to record a full album quickly. The album that resulted, produced by Bob Johnston, was titled "Sounds of Silence" after the hit, and it was released just seventeen days into the new year.
The album peaked at number 21 on the Billboard 200. That number is worth sitting with. The single was a phenomenon; the album was a solid commercial success, not a chart-topper. The distinction matters because it tells you something about what the record actually is. "Sounds of Silence" is not a blockbuster shaped around a hit. It is a folk album that happens to open with one. The eleven tracks that follow "The Sound of Silence" are mostly quiet, mostly acoustic, and mostly written by a twenty-three-year-old Paul Simon who had spent two years playing small venues in England and thinking carefully about songs.
"Kathy's Song," fourth on the tracklist, is a love letter to a woman Simon had met in England, written with the kind of plainness that takes real skill to sustain. "April Come She Will," ninth, sets a traditional folk melody against a lyric about the arc of a relationship across seasons. "A Most Peculiar Man," eighth, is a character study of a suicide, told in the clipped, reported tones of a neighbor who barely knew him. These are not songs that announce themselves. They accumulate.
Track six is "Anji," a solo guitar instrumental written by British folk guitarist Davy Graham. Simon plays it alone, no vocals, no harmony. Early pressings of the LP mistakenly credited it to Bert Jansch, who had recorded it on his own 1965 debut. The error was corrected on later reissues. The inclusion of the piece is its own kind of statement: Simon had absorbed the British folk revival during his time abroad, and "Anji" is the most direct evidence of that influence on the record.
"Richard Cory," seventh, adapts an Edwin Arlington Robinson poem about a wealthy man who, despite every apparent advantage, takes his own life. Simon keeps the narrative structure of the poem but adds a working-class narrator whose envy of Cory gives the ending its particular weight. "I Am a Rock," which closes the album at track eleven, was released as a single in May 1966 and became the third charting single from the record, following "The Sound of Silence" and "Homeward Bound," which had been released on January 19, 1966, two days after the album itself.
The production across the album is spare. Bob Johnston, who would go on to produce Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" later that same year, keeps the arrangements close to the songs. The electric overdub on "The Sound of Silence" is the loudest thing on the record, and it was added by someone else. Everything Simon and Garfunkel actually recorded for the album leans acoustic, close, and careful.
That contrast is the album's quiet argument. The song that made the duo famous was altered without their knowledge to fit a commercial moment. The album they then made in response is full of songs that resist that kind of alteration. They are specific, literary, and rooted in a folk tradition that values the unadorned line. "Sounds of Silence" is the record Simon and Garfunkel made once they understood what had been done to them, and what it had cost them, and what it had given them. The two things are not easy to separate, and the album does not try.
