Garfunkel’s expanding his range
04/23/2009 05:32 ПП | ArticlesIt’s hard to believe Art Garfunkel when he says he never realized he had a voice until a few years ago.
Oh, he knew his sweet, vibrato-filled tenor could deliver an emotionally charged pop ballad better than almost anyone on the planet. In fact, he says he was just 5 when he first recognized that he possessed an extraordinary vocal gift.
Still, it would take another 55 years before Garfunkel’s true voice finally surfaced on his 2002 album, “Everything Waits to Be Noticed.” That’s because the album marked his debut as a songwriter.
Why the long wait?
“In all honesty, Paul Simon was in the way for a large part of my life,” he said, pausing for a moment to reflect on his choice of words.
Garfunkel quickly added he didn’t mean that in a negative way. To the contrary, from the time they began working together as teenagers in a duo they called Tom and Jerry, he knew his former singing partner was a songwriting genius.
“If I had tried to put a song of mine in the Simon and Garfunkel years, I don’t believe it would compete with how marvelous Paul was as a writer,” he explained, not hiding his admiration for his former partner, with whom he’s had some legendary artistic disagreements over the years.
Had Garfunkel tried to write songs during the pair’s wildly successful run up the music charts in the 1960s, he knew Simon’s songwriting abilities would cast such a huge shadow that he’d probably face the wrath of critics and audiences no matter how great his tunes might have been.
“I could hear all too loudly [them] saying, ‘Oh, you mean he’s a songwriter, too?’ ” Garfunkel said during a recent interview.
That’s not to say he didn’t make any contributions other than his voice. The singers’ arrangements are filled with lines and melodies he wrote and added to the songs in the studio.
Even after Garfunkel and Simon parted company in 1970, though, he never had the urge to write music.
“When I started my solo career, there were so many tunes by others that I wanted to do,” he said. “There were so many things that I was dying to get to that I just didn’t feel the need to [write]. I know it was the age of the singer-songwriter, but I just felt very much like a singer.”
Over the past 20 years, Garfunkel, 67, has written prose poetry, some of which became the basis for songs he co-wrote with Buddy Mondlock and Maia Sharp for the 2002 album.
“I took some of the things that I [had written] and together we sweated out those songs,” said Garfunkel, who’ll be the featured performer Saturday when Caesars Atlantic City hosts the annual scholarship gala for Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
The show he’s planning will span virtually his entire career. That includes the material he and Simon spun into solid gold during the 1960s.
“I love to sing songs like ‘Bridge (Over Troubled Water)’ and ‘Scarborough (Fair),’ ” he said.
He’s released a dozen solo albums over the past 35 years, including his landmark 1975 platinum album “Breakaway” and his 2007 disc “Some Enchanted Evening,” in which he sampled the great American songbook. The show will also hit high notes from those albums and others, he said.
The only time Garfunkel, who had been insightful and talkative during the interview, clammed up was when he was asked if another reunion tour with Simon was in the works. The pair last toured in 2003-2004.
“Maybe,” he said with a sly grin.
Soon?