The boxer

I've been back from Kuala Lumpur for several days now and while trying to settle back into my normal routine, I bumped into an old YouTube video of Paul Simon performing The Boxer at a live show in Paris. I've known this song for most of my life, of course. The original Simon and Garfunkel recording has been with us since 1969 and I must have listened to it countless times over the years. But this particular performance impressed me tremendously. Paul Simon was no longer the young man who wrote the song, but there he was, guitar in hand, performing it with such ease and confidence that I found myself listening to it several times.

There was a simplicity about it all. The original recording of The Boxer was a magnificent piece of studio work but here was Simon performing the song live with his guitar, and somehow it worked just as well. Perhaps even better, with the warmth, maturity and intimacy that came through in the performance.

Of course, once I had started listening to The Boxer, it was only a matter of time before I found myself going back to Bridge Over Troubled Water. One song led to another, and before I knew it, I had spent an hour wandering through music that I hadn't properly listened to for years.

Bridge Over Troubled Water was released in January 1970 and was Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's fifth studio album. It was also their last. The record went on to become one of the most successful albums of all time, winning six Grammy Awards the following year, including Album of the Year. Yet, behind the scenes, things were becoming increasingly difficult between the two men.

Simon and Garfunkel had been together, in one form or another, since their schooldays. By the late 1960s, however, their relationship had become strained. Art Garfunkel had also begun pursuing an acting career and was away filming Catch-22 while work was still continuing on the album. The recording itself took almost two years, and I can only imagine the difficulties involved in putting everything together when one half of the partnership was increasingly occupied elsewhere.

What eventually emerged was quite unlike the Simon and Garfunkel of their earlier folk days. Bridge Over Troubled Water was a varied album. The title song had its gospel flavour, El Cóndor Pasa took them into the world of Andean music, Cecilia was infectious pop, while Keep the Customer Satisfied went off in yet another musical direction. Paul Simon was clearly stretching himself as a songwriter and exploring a wider range of musical styles.

And then there was The Boxer, which had actually been recorded earlier and released as a single in 1969 before being included on the album. It was Paul Simon's song, written at a time when he himself was apparently feeling rather battered by criticism from the music press. The story of the lonely young man struggling to survive in New York has always seemed rather personal, even if Simon himself may not have intended it to be read as autobiography.

But watching Paul Simon in that YouTube video made me realise that after Simon and Garfunkel went their separate ways, The Boxer continued to live on in Simon's own concerts. He had written it and sung the lead vocal on the original recording, while Garfunkel supplied the beautiful harmonies, but over the years it became a song that Simon kept returning to.

Perhaps that is why the Paris performance impressed me. Here was a song written by a young Paul Simon about a young man being knocked about by life and refusing to give up. Decades later, Simon was still singing it, but the years had indeed rolled by. The song was the same, but the man singing it was older, just like me.

I suppose that comes from revisiting music from our younger days. The songs haven't changed, but we have. We hear things differently and perhaps understand them differently too. When Bridge Over Troubled Water was released in 1970, I was simply enjoying their music, not caring that this would be their final studio album together. All I knew was that they had produced some wonderful songs. And more than half a century later, The Boxer pops up on my YouTube, Paul Simon is performing it in Paris, and there I am again, being taken all the way back to Bridge Over Troubled Water.