The Only Living Boy in New York

This is Simon & Garfunkel at their most wistful and self-aware, a song suffused with the particular ache of separation between people who genuinely love each other. The production is loose and warm in a way that feels almost accidental — a casual piano figure, light percussion, voices layered with a breeziness that masks the depth of feeling underneath. Tom was the one who left, who flew to England, and Art stayed in New York, and the song is Paul writing to him across that distance, the city becoming both prison and sanctuary. There is an airiness to the arrangement that sounds like wide open skies even as the lyrics acknowledge the loneliness of being left behind. The vocal harmonies here don't perform their usual precision — instead they feel easy, lived-in, like two people who have been singing together so long they breathe in sync without trying. What the song captures that few songs do is the particular feeling of being happy for someone you miss — pride and longing occupying the same moment without canceling each other out. The bridge expands briefly, the sky opens, and then it closes back into that gentle loping rhythm. It belongs to the late 1960s dissolution of a partnership, two young men aware that something is ending, making something beautiful out of that awareness. Listen to it in a city apartment in the afternoon, light coming through at a low angle, when someone important to you is elsewhere and you've made peace with that, mostly.