Paul Simon, 82, is a music legend. 60 years ago, he wrote the song that would ‘irrevocably change’ his life

As Simon tells us near the outset of director Alex Gibney’s new documentary “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” the moment represented a breakthrough in his songwriting. “There was a very easy flow of creative energy,” he says of the impromptu bathroom session that gave birth to the now famous song “The Sounds of Silence.” “One second ago that thought wasn’t here and now I’m weeping. How’d that happen? And how can I do it again?”

Needless to say, Simon clearly discovered the answer. Now 82, his career has since yielded some 20 studio albums (15 of them solo, five with Art Garfunkel) and solidified his place — in the words of scholar Scott Calhoun — as “one of the few narrators to have kept pace with Bob Dylan’s quality of comment on the American story.” Since the 1960s, Simon’s work has increasingly spanned continents and cultures, incorporating everything from English folk and New Orleans jazz to Latin rhythms and South African township jive. He’s established a catalogue as original and varied as any in the history of popular music. 

That achievement is fully captured in “In Restless Dreams,” which does for Simon what Martin Scorsese did for Dylan in “No Direction Home” (2005).

In the doc, Gibney alternates between archival footage and more intimate sequences of Simon in conversation at his Texas home amid work on his latest album (last year’s spartan and contemplative “Seven Psalms”), and the recent loss of hearing in his left ear. The director’s approach is usefully thorough, covering everything over its two parts from Simon’s childhood and on again/off again partnership with Garfunkel to his personal life and later masterworks “Graceland” (1986) and “The Rhythm of the Saints” (1990) in great detail.

While the period between 1990 and “Seven Psalms” (in which Simon recorded six more albums) is regrettably left out, the film’s dual narrative successfully links past and present, achieving a fulsome portrait of the artist at its centre — and giving us as close a look at Simon as we’ve ever had before. 

Born in Newark in 1941 to immigrant parents of Hungarian-Jewish origin and raised in Queens, Simon received his first acoustic guitar in 1955. He spent the next several years practising, performing at school dances and writing songs of his own. Musically, most fell squarely within the mainstream pop idioms of day: emulating both the cheerful harmonies of the Everly Brothers and the more wistful sounds of doo-wop increasingly heard on street corners in the city’s Black, Italian and Jewish neighbourhoods.

In sixth grade, Simon met his most important early collaborator. He befriended Art Garfunkel during a production of “Alice in Wonderland” (the two portrayed the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, respectively), and, at age 16, the pair — then calling themselves Tom and Jerry — enjoyed a minor hit with the Everly-inspired bubble gum bop “Hey Schoolgirl” (1957). 

The duo’s success, however, was short-lived. When their subsequent singles failed to chart, both went their separate ways, setting in motion a pattern they would later repeat. They pursued post-secondary studies: Garfunkel in architecture and Simon in English. Between 1957 and 1963, Simon nonetheless continued to pump out songs that, save for a 1962 novelty track called “The Lone Teen Ranger” that squeaked into the charts, similarly failed to launch. 

Everything changed in 1964. Inspired by the burgeoning Greenwich Village folk scene (and its rising star Bob Dylan), Simon landed an audition at Columbia Records with Garfunkel at his side. Calling themselves Simon & Garfunkel at the somewhat bold suggestion of Columbia’s president, Goddard Lieberson — “It was a pretty radical thing to have ethnic names (at the time),” Simon points out in the film — the pair performed “The Sounds of Silence” for Dylan’s producer Tom Wilson. They were signed on the spot. Soon after, they released their debut album “Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.”

The album’s centrepiece, “The Sounds of Silence” marked a clear departure from Simons’ songwriting efforts to date. Its haunting and plaintive melody, soon to be supplemented by Garfunkel’s shimmering tenor, was a far cry from the teenybopper crooning of the 1950s, while its powerful lyricism conjured vivid imagery of dark reveries and disturbed dreams. The song was a clear leap forward, but the debut Simon & Garfunkel album itself sold poorly, with initial sales estimated to be as low as 1,000 copies. Parting ways with Garfunkel again, Simon went to England and continued to hone his craft, recording his excellent (and oft-overlooked) solo debut “The Paul Simon Songbook” (1965). 

This, too, met a frustratingly cool reception. But back in America, Simon’s persistence was soon rewarded in a remarkable twist of fate. On his own initiative, Wilson had produced a new version of “The Sounds of Silence” that supplemented the original with drums and electric guitars, and released it as a single. With astonishing speed, it shot to No. 1 and became an international sensation. “I said to myself, my life is irrevocably changed,” Simon recalls of that moment.

Simon and Garfunkel seized upon their new-found success and made four more studio albums in as many years. Both released in 1966, the folky records ”Sounds of Silence” and ”Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” drew partly on existing music from Simon’s catalogue, several of which had first appeared on ”The Paul Simon Songbook.” 1968 saw the release of ”Bookends” and a popular soundtrack to Mike Nichols’ hit film ”The Graduate” that memorably included “Mrs. Robinson.” With “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970), the duo reached the pinnacle of their success just as their partnership crescendoed to a painful rupture. 

The breakup of Simon & Garfunkel has been extensively discussed, but Gibney still affords it considerable attention and admirably gives voice to the latter’s side of the story. From the outset, the pair’s collaboration had always been asymmetrical: Garfunkel often took lead vocals, but Simon was the sole songwriter and very much the duo’s prime creative force. With Garfunkel away filming “Catch-22” (Mike Nichols’ followup to “The Graduate”) and Simon working for months alone in the studio, their relationship frayed to a point beyond repair. 

“Maybe it’s my perfect Freudian trauma that my mother said to me once: ‘You have a good voice, but Arthur has a fine voice,’” Simon comments in the documentary, later adding: “I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I just was consumed with writing music and making records, and my wife Peggy said ‘Hey, you write the songs. What should you be worried about?’” Garfunkel, for his part, hoped to keep the duo together and Simon’s abrupt decision to go his own way created a schism that was still felt by both men, even when they later reunited.

By the recording of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” — which included the likes of “Cecilia”, an avant-garde rhythm experiment, and “El Condor Pasa (If I Could)”, a reworking of a traditional Peruvian song — Simon’s music had already extended itself beyond the confines of British folk or American pop. In the decades that followed, his eclecticism extended itself still further. Throughout the 1970s and early ’80s as a solo artist, he continued to experiment,  drawing on everything from Dixieland and Jamaican reggae to Southern gospel. 

By the time of “Graceland” and its successor, “The Rhythm of the Saints” (1990), the trajectory had taken Simon to the point of full immersion in the music of other cultures. Arguably Simon’s greatest artistic success, “Graceland” also generated the biggest controversy of his career when he was accused of violating the cultural boycott against South Africa’s apartheid regime by the African National Congress, prompting a well-publicized dispute that hung over the album and its subsequent tour. (The film, for its part, doesn’t elide the controversy but could have gone into more detail about the politics surrounding the boycott.) 

“In Restless Dreams” devotes over half its running time to Simon’s solo career, but the portrait that ultimately emerges suggests an underlying continuity that links together the various phases of his career. 

Since at least the mid-1960s, he has taken a syncretic approach toward his music, often working at the intersection of different genres or styles, and seeking out the points of agreement between them. Many of Simon’s songs, from “The Sounds of Silence” right up to those found on “Seven Psalms” (the idea for which reportedly appeared to him in a dream) also seem to have been developed through an intuitive process: often originating from a single line, phase or rhythm then gradually growing around it. “I like to work and then discover,” he tells Gibney.

Certain themes have persisted in his work — among them silence and emptiness, mortality and the passage of time, loneliness and solitude — but Simon has most often explored them by posing questions rather than offering definitive answers. This is particularly evident throughout “Seven Psalms,” which emanates faith and skepticism in near equal measure. “This whole piece,” he says of the album and its themes, “is really an argument I’m having with myself about belief or not.” 

As minimalist as any since the early ’60s, the record in many ways sees the songwriter returning to the very place he began and, if it ends up being his final testament, it will also be a fitting coda for his career. From the moment he first plucked those memorable notes in the darkness to the closing stanzas of “Seven Psalms,” Paul Simon has been turning the restlessness within himself into luminous sounds that have never failed to fill the silence or drown out the gloom.