Simon & Garfunkel

“Juke-Box” is a step back from the album format, a return to the building blocks of pop: songs. Riffs, choruses, words and images: the images of the videos themselves, or the ones that music evokes and uses to seduce the listener.

The purpose of this column is precisely to enter into this game of seduction, always crucial and always taken for granted. To uncover its stories and protagonists, but above all its mechanisms, rules and exceptions. Guided by a simple question: how does a song work?

There's no way to answer that once and for all. In the sidebar there will be other angles to explore, different “threads” that the song crosses or leaves behind. Ready to drop in the coin?

Let's start with a simple, intense song that stirs emotion without needing any commentary. Like every truly simple song, “America” is more complex than it seems.

 

Two lovers leave behind their everyday routines for a journey across their own country, the United States, which the song simply calls “America.” The narrative is never explicit: it proceeds through images, oblique hints that bring the most mundane details into focus while leaving the wider picture vague, suspended. The Greyhound bus caught in Pittsburgh, the hitchhiking from Saginaw, the New Jersey Turnpike. These are the only vivid clues to the couple's life, flashes of memory that never answer the real questions: who are they? where do they come from? where are they going?

 

It's a journey dominated by tenderness, by the warmth of two companions sitting side by side on a long-distance bus, dozing against one another as they look out the window. Tenderness and intimacy are suggested from the very first notes of the song – a velvety murmur that lulls, swells gently and introduces the descending theme of the verse.

Even America itself arrives before the lyrics evoke it, carried in by a tremolo guitar in pure The Band. The dialogue between the two elements – the tenderness between the two lovers and their shared search for “America” – is the heart of the song, and it shapes its path.

 

In the first verse, nothing disturbs the bucolic mood. Vocal harmonies almost whispered, acoustic chords moving confidently along, riding the good old Pachelbel's Canon progression. The words tell of departure, of expectations, of dreams. The same goes for the second verse, though – a subtle detail – it closes on a “suspended” chord, a major seventh, landing right on the word “America.” It's the first hint of incompleteness, of wavering.

What follows is a bridge, made up entirely of major sevenths, describing the daydreams on the bus. A saxophone plays quietly in the background, muffled: “Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces/ She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/ I said be careful his bowtie is really a camera”. Three consecutive lines devoted to a single image: it's the most conventionally narrative moment in the song. It's also the dreamiest moment, and it fades silently into the next verse. The listless craving for a cigarette in the coat pocket, a magazine she's reading, distant. The moonlight bleaching the colors outside.

 

Organ. “Cathy, I'm lost – I said, though I knew she was sleeping.” This is the emotional peak of the song, the moment when, just after that unlikely confession, the dream of “America” itself dissolves, leaving behind a bleak sense of emptiness.

Two lines, and the lyrics never return to it. But that's enough to cast a shadow over the song: organ, vocal harmonies and a sudden, unplanned touch of percussion converge for one instant, and one instant only, into a sudden and elusive bitterness. A negative epiphany, projecting intimate disillusionment onto a universal, almost spiritual scale.

The final crescendo seems to slip away. The gaze is lost counting the passing cars, the mind closed in on itself.

Only the organ remains: with it, fading out, go America and its illusions.

(19/04/2010)