“Why do I hate it?”: Paul Simon muses on the fate of a Simon and Garfunkel classic
Paul Simon always seems to occupy his own unique space in rock and roll. He wasn’t a voice of a generation trying to tell people how to live like Bob Dylan, nor was he the kind of whimsical storyteller looking to make some fictionalised version of romance like Paul McCartney. With Simon, you always knew that you would be getting something earnest, but he also came by it honestly when he admitted that he didn’t enjoy ‘Homeward Bound’.
Then again, you have to remember the amount of fatigue one can get from playing a song over and over again on tour. No matter how much you may have liked it when you came up with the track in your apartment, having it play nonstop in your head is enough for anyone to never want to play the song at all.
Granted, it would have taken someone with a serious chip on their shoulder to say that they absolutely hate ‘Homeward Bound’. Although Simon and Garfunkel had their differences going into the recording of later albums like Bridge Over Troubled Water, this is the perfect song that could soundtrack a glorious family film, longing to get back to that sense of innocence you once had.
Even though Simon was still barely into his 20s when he wrote it, it feels like it should be sung from the perspective of someone more than twice his age. Considering a lot of people have those long stretches of time away from their families and would give everything to come home, this feels like a better song for Simon to have sung in his solo career decades on rather than at the start of his career.
It seemed that Simon felt the same way, telling Playboy, “I was thinking, I hate ‘Homeward Bound’. Why do I hate it? I said, ‘Oh, I hate the words’. …I wanted to get home to my girlfriend, Kathy, in London. I was 22. I thought, ‘Well, that’s not a bad song for a 22-year-old kid. It’s actually quite touching now that I see it. So I wonder what’s so embarrassing to me about it. Then I said, ‘I know! It’s that I don’t want to be singing this song as Simon and Garfunkel.”
For as sweet as both of them sound together, it’s also easy to hear the song as one person singing. This is taken from the perspective of someone alone pining to just get back home, and the fact that there’s someone alongside him kind of breaks the illusion just a little bit.
Still, the best version of the song doesn’t even have the iconic duo singing together on it. When Saturday Night Live was still in its infancy, hearing Simon duet the song alongside George Harrison was one of the most sublime versions of the song, with Harrison taking the lower harmony and never overpowering what Simon was doing.
Whereas most of ‘Homeward Bound’ would be anyone’s greatest song, Simon was just getting started on his love affair with different sounds. It may have been one of the many classics that he had under his belt, but when you reach the heights of Graceland, it’s sometimes hard to see your older tracks as anything but a naive little kid.