By Paul Freeman [2003 Interview]

Few voices in the history of pop music have been as recognizable -- or as moving -- as that of Art Garfunkel.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Garfunkel in 2003, following the release of his "Everything Waits to Be Noticed" album.

His imaginative, unconventional memoir "What Is It All but Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man" was published in 2017. Garfunkel continues to transport audiences through his live performances. In October of 2019, he played Carnegie Hall, sharing the stage with his wife Kathryn Luce and their sons Arthur Jr. (James), 27, and Beau Daniel, 13. He has for decades been considered one of pop music's finest interpreters of song. Now the golden-voiced crooner Art Garfunkel is finally writing his own tunes. You know of his historic partnership with Paul Simon. Garfunkel has now teamed with singer-songwriters Buddy Mondlock and Maia Sharp on the album "Everything Waits To Be Noticed," a beautiful collection blending pop, folk and jazz sensibilities.

"I'm proud of it myself. It's better than I expected," Garfunkel says.

Producer-singer-songwriter Billy Mann (Carole King, Celine Dion) had long been hoping to work with Garfunkel. "He'd been pitching me to be my producer for a year or so, through my office. And I'm defensive about trusting anybody, anywhere, anytime," Garfunkel says, laughing.

Mann and Graham Lyle co-wrote a song called "Bounce" especially for Garfunkel and called him from London. "He played it for me on the phone," Garfunkel recalls. "It was a gem, an infectious shuffle that hooked me, and I said, 'I'm inclined to want to pull closer to this scenario. You be the producer. I'll be the artist.'"

Mann shot back with the notion of teaming Garfunkel with two singer-songwriters, Sharp and Mondlock. Sharp had penned songs for Cher and Paul Carrack; Mondlock for Joan Baez and Garth Brooks. Mann wanted Garfunkel himself to get involved in the songwriting. The idea wasn't completely unprecedented. Garfunkel began writing prose poems in the 80s.

"I thought, it's time to say these things, succinctly and interestingly, with a rhyme and reason to the flow of the syllables, so they'll dance... and it won't by jumbly, like I'm talking now," Garfunkel says with a chuckle.

Mann's entreaties convinced Garfunkel that it was time to ponder songwriting. "I said, 'If my poems could be amalgamated, somehow made into songs, then you would have done a big thing for me, Billy.' He said, 'Well, these writers can do that."

Several compositions from Garfunkel's poetry book "Still Water" served as song seeds. Mondlock began working on the poem titled "Perfect Moment." New Yorker Garfunkel flew to Nashville to hear the results. "I came in and had the thrill of my life, hearing this super, pretty song. And I'm a real sucker for pretty things. It was unfinished, but it was my notion, fleshed out, wonderfully capturing the spirit. I thought, 'That's my baby, all right. And what a lovely treatment.' I pulled up a chair and learned to sing it."

Garfunkel then helped finish the song. Sharp flew in the next day, and the threesome quickly wrote "Wishbone," based on a Garfunkel poem about the loss of someone. "We took the genesis of that notion and wrote a song that day. I'd never done that before. Writers do a lot of pacing around and hunting around and looking for the rhyme. But the process was not too laborious.

"Once I met Maia, I thought, 'Billy's vision is right. These two talents are extreme.' Billy pulled it all together. He was clearly the captain."

Garfunkel, who co-wrote six of the songs on the album, found songwriting to be quite different from composing poetry. "When I wrote prose poems, I got a flash of inspiration of something I wanted to say, that I thought was inherently interesting, that I'd been thinking about all my life. Poems are dense. You take your thoughts, and in order to say it in as few words as you can, it's a rich nugget of concept. Those are my poems, anyway.

"Songs are different. They tend to have couplets. They tend to be a little easier in the use of language. They can't take too much density and richness. You can't be arty. Even if it's good arty, it tends to be not songlike. Songs are different. They're seamless marriages of words and music, making these wonderful song phrases."

Garfunkel hopes to continue his involvement in songwriting. "This doesn't feel like a manipulation of the marketplace," he says. "It feels like a new avenue of growth for me that I'm happy to step into, not dabble in. I had flying dreams, when I started writing. Some really nice inner releases. So there's been a piece of growth that's gone down that feels nice."

His exquisite singing has made diverse songs take flight. Entwined with the voice of longtime musical partner Paul Simon, it resulted in such folk-rock classics as "Sounds of Silence" and "Mrs. Robinson." Garfunkel's crystalline lead on "Bridge Over Troubled Water" melted countless hearts. Then he established a solo career, which also produced numerous hits. With ample musical gifts, why didn't he try songwriting earlier?

"I think I was blocked. I'm a words man and a notes man. So it's all there. But for some reason I never brought myself to sit at the piano, chain my leg to it and stay there while I doodled, hunted, made discoveries, put it down on tape and did that sweat that's called songwriting.

"In the '60s, I said, 'I ain't gonna do it, because it'll look like I'm going for equal time' - - vis-a-vis Paul Simon, whom I thought was a towering talent. Why even pretend that I need to put two songs of mine on the next album when I think Paul has that part of Simon and Garfunkel covered?"

Did he and Simon ever consider co-writing? "No," Garfunkel says. "It never came up. It's as if Paul never needed help in his writing. He didn't need to split the royalties." Garfunkel laughs. "You're going to put that in the article and that's going to be the title -- 'Royalty Stingy!'"

The late 60s and 70s saw the rise of the singer-songwriter. Suddenly most singers and musicians began penning at least some of their material. And many songwriters were given opportunities to sing their own tunes. Prior to that, there was a greater appreciation for song interpreters, those who could take a writer's vision and weave musical magic from it. "Thank you. A little known point. I'm so glad when people bring that out." says Garfunkel, certainly one of the finest song interpreters of all time.

Are we starting to see that appreciation for interpreters growing again? "I don't know if I see that. It should be that, if you sing a song in a special way, then that performance matters. I would like to think that things are more open to that, because I was that guy for years, the guy who sings... and thinks that's a lot."

For musical artists, whatever songs they're performing, creating an image becomes part of the success formula. "You know, there's the talent and the art itself. And then there's this thing that they taught us at Columbia called 'the cult of personality,' where the artist is the thing. And if his personality is fascinating, if Van Gogh will cut off his ear and send it in a shoebox to his prostitute friend, you've got a major artist career going," he laughs. "These are the things that sell paintings. So the person becomes the thing.

"When Dylan came along, we all thought that person was the closest thing the music business has to James Dean. The personhood becomes the thing and it takes wings beyond the art that either is there or isn't there. If you love the person, and he's cool, it almost doesn't matter."

Prominent in activism, as well as music, Garfunkel has always been an intriguing personality. Writing has broadened his creative horizons. "To flip over your argument and talk about how much the world seems to over-praise the singer-songwriter. I guess I now fall into the plus side of that phenomenon. Now I'm a singer-songwriter, whatever that means," Garfunkel says, laughing.

"What's really interesting, in terms of identity, is whether you feel you're a writer or not. And it's really, forget songwriter, I became a writer in the 80s, when I was writing these poems. And it really shifted my sense of myself a little bit. I did feel more thoughtful, all through the 80s, more sober and more examining of everything. For me it felt like, to be a writer is to be a thinker and to weigh your words with a little more care."

The new album, in addition to Garfunkel's stirring lead vocals and elegant lyrics, offers enchanting harmonies. Can he blend perfectly with anyone or does it require a special chemistry?

"You've got to have mutual respect. For me, I can't be a slummer and bring my talent, that I respect, to the wrong arena. And here, the three of us, I believe we think the world of each other. I certainly do of them. And when I started singing 'Perfect Moment' with Buddy and I saw how spare his guitar chords were and what an effortless singing style, I thought, 'Well, I love to sing real easy, but he tops me. He's easier.'

"Let it go. Have no force. Get the human condition out of the way, so the musical feeling just happens, from your gut to your lips to the microphone and there is no will in the way. So effortless. And those things record really well, when you can be so easy and give it up into the mic. You get beautiful intimacy and diction. Buddy taught me that. He got me down to a zen relaxed level I never knew before as a singer. And you hear that in a lot of the unisons he and I are doing on that album. And Maia, I just can't say enough about Maia. I feel like I walked into the room and there's a young Billie Holiday and the world doesn't know it just yet. But Billy Mann and I do."

Garfunkel has always been able to create enticing sounds through harmonies. Now his son James is displaying a similar ability.

"He's getting into it now at age 11. He hears a song and he'll sing something and I'l go, 'Now when they're singing that note, do you feel instinctively, James, the choices you have? You can't harmonize that with any old note. Some are right and some are wrong. Can you feel what will fit the chord?'

"It is a mixture of being a tuned human being, a musical being, and then having the confidence of self-expression. The more you try stuff and have confidence that your own ears will tell you right from wrong, the more you can make private practice your means of development."

He guides his son gently in terms of music, not pushing him in any way. "I believe in air. Leave things alone. Let things happen. I don't like to push, swerve, manipulate. But when something accidentally happens right and comes out of my son, I want to be immediate in my noticing it and praising it. It is an encouraging thing. I would like to see James be acquainted with one of the great riches in this world -- the notes, their combinations, the fascination of music and its possibilities. It's one of God's great faces."

Garfunkel's heavenly voice has retained its pure, ethereal qualities. It's not the result of a painstaking regimen. "I believe in leaving it alone. Singing is a lot about loving. Just love your song and be unashamed. Even though you're a man, you're going to show your love of the notes out loud and you're going to warble and vibrate to it.

"Now guys don't like to do that kind of thing. Girls sometimes do. But it's a commitment of -- let the inside out. And it makes us shy. And my life is a lot about, 'I'm too shy to do it publicly, but I can do it here in this stairwell, where the tiles give such a good reverb. If nobody comes around, I can sing wonderfully for my own pleasure.' And that's what it's always been for me. And I have left it alone on that level all my life -- no teaching, no instruction, no voice development.

"I like to get out of town and take long walks. I'm a believer in air and lung power. Singers, we have to get the horizon in the sky. And we need privacy to sing. And I've brought this whole vocal development thing and all that privacy to the recording studio, to share with the world.

"And now, ever so slowly, I'm learning to be a stage performer, which is really the end of privacy. And it doesn't come easy to me. I'm a contemplative, philosophical type. But I've now done so many shows, the ones in the past with Paul and the ones all through the 90s with my own band. And I'm comfortable now on stage, as the guy. I grew up slowly."

Though Garfunkel is excited about his current and future musical projects, he doesn't mind reflecting on the past. "I like the past. I minored in history. So I like to ponder the past, whether it's mine or the world's. I think the present is very informed by the past. We live in the stream of time. That's our context. So I enjoy looking back and seeing what really has this all been about."

At a time when the pop music scene was exploding with rambunctious, brash, energetic records, Simon and Garfunkel offered gentler pleasures. "After all, my very style was to be a man who was dealing with pretty and flowing and watery things. So there's already a bravery there. But it is my nature to trust that a benign smile can be as powerful as something raucous.

"There's power in understatement. Subtlety is good. A song that asks people to examine a little thing, that illuminates a large thing -- there's power in all these things. And Paul and I carved that poetic route, that literary route. And yes, I was conscious that very few were going down this English major kind of style. I was conscious. You love to be different. I love that we were in our own segment. It's fun to not do what everyone else is doing.

"But we never would have caught on, if we didn't have our years of doo-wop training, where we were enthralled with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. So we knew how to make rhythm swing in a way that was in the idiom of rock 'n' roll. That's crucial. Otherwise, we would have been an interesting side note that was kind of arty. But if you look at our records, a lot of them are hits because the bass and the drums are cooking and you really want to dance to it."

Simon's songs would not have made nearly the same kind of impact without Garfunkel's glorious voice and astonishing vocal arrangements. As for the duo's legacy, Garfunkel says, "It's in the body of work. It's in those albums. I don't know how to sum that up, except I'm involved in who's good, who's very good, who's not good. Those are the distinctions I make. And I'm pleased with my body of work. It's a source of pride to me. I see Paul and I as having put a nice cornerstone block in the edifice that is rock 'n' roll, somewhere down around the second floor... with a nice, sizable block in that building."

Garfunkel became a pop culture icon in the duo years and then achieved success as a solo artist with hits like "All I Know," "I Shall Sing," "I Only Have Eyes for You," "Break Away," "Bright Eyes" and "(What a) Wonderful World." He won a Grammy Award for Best Children's Album with 1998's "Songs From a Parent to a Child."

He also made his mark as an actor, appearing in such significant films as "Catch-22," "Carnal Knowledge" and "Bad Timing."

"I like acting. I'm passionate about it. You just can't do everything at once. But you can do a lot of things one at a time, without feeling like you're a dilettante. I've majored in life in the subject called singing. But I've minored in some things that I quite love, acting being one. I've gotten good reviews and encouragement for what I've done and I'd be happy if the right script came my way. I don't want to play weird. I used to have an instinct for that -- Give me the purple project. Now I'd just as soon be a dad... because people think you are that person they see on the screen. They don't make the simple connection that an actor plays parts. So I'd like to be hero. I'm in the mood to be a hero, actually."

Is there something left he feels a burning need to accomplish?

"It's not so much that that drives me forward. It's the fun of doing this, the feeling that this is a calling, this thing of singing, the fact that, like people get good hair days, I get good voice days and it really is good. And in my mind, I'm called upon to share it, to bring it out and forward it into the market, when you're hot, where you feel, 'I really want to show off about this lucky gift that I have.' And it's not that I have a new goal. It's that I want to do what I've always been doing, I just want to do it more effectively. I want to do it better. That's all.

"Intensity of feeling makes you more effective. My friend Jack Nicholson used to say, 'At this point in my life, I cultivate naiveté.' That gets very close to what I think I do without realizing it. The more you can relax and become a master of getting out of your own way, uncovering the inner truth of your own connection with that script or that song, your real connection with it, with nothing forced or adorned or clever, the more you can subtract and then address the mic with that authenticity, the better."

For the latest on this artist, including upcoming concert dates, visit www.artgarfunkel.com.