There is a new duo in town: Garfunkel & Garfunkel. If the name seems oddly familiar, well, it is exactly what it appears to be. At the age of 82, the great American vocalist Art Garfunkel has teamed up with his 33-year-old musician son, Art Garfunkel Jr, to record an album of close harmony duets, prosaically titled Father and Son.
“I was born to do this,” says Garfunkel, talking to me from New York about his first album in seven years. “I sing as a way of life.”
He became world famous in the 1960s as half of Simon & Garfunkel and continued to enjoy solo success after they broke up in 1970. There were sporadic reunion tours, but the duo last performed together in 2010 and have since spoken about each other with a weariness bordering on outright acrimony. Now, though, Garfunkel just sounds sad about the loss of his original singing partner. “I miss Paul,” he admits. “I haven’t seen him in a few years. I wrote to him the other day, so we’ll see.” Of which, more later.
In the meantime, he has made an album of close harmony duets very much in the style of Simon & Garfunkel with his son, who has been appearing on stage with him since he was a very young child. “It was inevitable that I would become a singer,” says Art Junior, joining in the conference call from Germany, where he has lived since he was 16 (he moved in with extended family members, and enjoyed some solo musical success there).
His pride in his father is so strong that he has legally changed his name from James to Arthur Garfunkel Jr. “My father’s musical gift has been a tremendous blessing in my life,” he insists. “His voice is in a golden league of its own, unmatchable I think by anyone in the world. It’s provided me with financial security and created for me an inherent fanbase. I’m thrilled that I was born into this family.”
“I’m just sitting here blushing,” says Dad.
Art calls his son Junior, Darling and Honey. Junior says Father and Daddy or refers to him in the third person by his full name. It is a curious dynamic. The more famous Art Garfunkel comes across as affectionate, indulgent, whimsically philosophical. Junior – the elder of Garfunkel’s two children, born to his (current) wife of 36 years, Kim – is firmer, more direct and energetic, very respectful towards his father while occasionally interrupting when he thinks the conversation might stray into anything potentially controversial. “I’m going to interject and tell my father to make sure that he answers very carefully,” he announces when a question touches on the state of relationships with Paul Simon.
“What do you mean?” says Garfunkel, curiously.
“Just what I said,” responds Junior, firmly.
Junior has enjoyed an unusual career based around Schlager music and German language versions of his father’s repertoire. They first appeared on stage together when he was a very young child, with his curly-haired appearance making him look like a Garfunkel mini-me. He appeared on the cover of 1997 album Songs from a Parent to a Child, and has toured with his father in recent years, supplementing the elder Garfunkel’s fading vocal prowess with his own very sweet tenor. Their voices are very alike, albeit separated by 50 years, with Garfunkel’s timbre becoming croakier. “I hear a big difference between us,” he says. “My voice is tender, and I attempt to be profound in my sound. It has a religious quality. Junior has more of an innocence to his singing.”
The harmonic blend on Father and Son is gorgeous, as they harmonise and interweave to lush orchestral and band backing on classics of the American songbook, some old 1950s and 1960s favourites of Garfunkel Senior’s by the Everly Brothers and Cat Stevens, and some very effective versions of Eighties pop songs that are favourites of Junior’s (including the first single, an interpretation of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, released today). Most surprisingly, there is also a new version of a Simon & Garfunkel classic, Old Friends, on which Art Senior mainly takes the lower Paul Simon harmonic parts whilst Junior sings the high lines his father made famous.
When I ask Garfunkel how his son compares as a duet partner to Paul Simon, he demurs. “Oh, I wouldn’t compare it. They’re very different. Whatever I say, it’s going to sound like I’m not being fair to Junior.” His son, however, presses the case, insisting his dad should say what he really thinks. “Paul Simon has a thoughtfulness,” continues Garfunkel.
“Sophisticated and thoughtful. There’s a poet in his style. That’s how I see Paul.”
“And when you sing these songs with me, how do you feel?” asks Junior.
“Like I love you. I’m just coming from a place of love,” responds Garfunkel.
Garfunkel says that your singing voice is “your closest friend through life. If you cross a threshold into a room and you feel insecure, your voice is your companion, just hum a little song and you’re never alone”. He has admitted to being prone to bouts of depression, but when I ask if music has been his salvation, he says, rather sadly: “Not really. It is my struggle.”
He has a reputation for perfectionism in the studio, taking his time to create pure, melodious performances, which, I suppose, is how you get vocals as awe-inspiring as his 1979 number one, Bright Eyes (which composer Mike Batt described as the most difficult session of his career) and 1970 Simon & Garfunkel classic Bridge Over Troubled Water (for which he recorded over 300 vocal takes). Yet he seems to harbour regrets. “I go crazy. I overdo it with that perfectionism.”
Over his long career, Garfunkel has acted in major films for leading directors (notably the 1970 adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, and Nicolas Roeg’s 1980 drama Bad Timing), published a volume of “prose poetry” (although he has never written songs) and until very recently maintained a website listing all the books he has read (running to over 1,000 titles spanning 1968-2023). “I’m finally getting a little tired of reading after all these years,” he admits to me. “For 50 years, the book in my hand has been my companion, and I’m finally saying ‘Enough already!’”
He admits that singing remains his prime motivation and obsession. He and Paul Simon met at school in 1953, where they learned to harmonise, and went on to become one of the best-selling music acts of all time. Yet over the years, Garfunkel has come across as envious of his former partner’s songwriting abilities and the implication that it cast Garfunkel as the junior partner in the relationship. Over the last decade, he has made bitter remarks onstage and to the media.
Speaking to The Telegraph in 2015, Garfunkel called Simon an “idiot” and a “jerk” and claimed that by befriending Simon at school he “created a monster”. When I asked Paul Simon about those comments in 2016, he said “There’s a guy who’s wrestling with his demons. And I understand it’s a hard battle he’s fighting but if you get close to him, you’ll be in the battle, and you’ll get hit.”
In 2018, Simon announced his retirement from touring, which you might think would put an end to talk of a reunion. Yet Garfunkel is candid about his desire to seek some kind of rapprochement.
“I miss Paul,” he confesses, touchingly. “Any difficulties are not worth clinging to, life is short, and the positive side of Simon & Garfunkel is there waiting to be related to. I would love to sing with him.”
This admission turns, unbidden, into a dreamy soliloquy about what might happen should they meet again. “Sometimes I think, what is the nature of hanging out? ‘Arthur,’ I say to myself, ‘you want to see Paul. What would you do with Paul?’ He calls you and he says, ‘Let’s have a coffee’ and I know how it would go. What do people do when they sit together to smoke cigarettes and talk? They need an activity. Paul will lean on this for sure. ‘Artie,’ he will say, ‘I’ve been writing something. You got to hear it.’
“And I’ll go over, and he’ll play me something that he’s been working on, and of course it’ll be magnificent, he’s just so damn talented, and I’ll be knocked out by it. I won’t be able to avoid showing him how impressed I am. I’ll light up when I hear it. He’ll be thrilled to know Artie is reinforcing his efforts, and we’ll be off and running. I’ll start singing something in harmony, because it all came so naturally. He’ll show me something that I love, and in the loving, I’ll be singing, and before you know it, there’s Simon and Garfunkel. We fell right back into what we always did.”
Father and Son, the forthcoming album by Garfunkel & Garfunkel, is released on November 8 via BMG. The first single, Time After Time, is available to be streamed now
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