The Boxer

Recorded over a hundred hours in three cities, including a church for the drum sound, this is Simon & Garfunkel's most elaborate production wearing the costume of a simple folk song. It begins with fingerpicked acoustic guitar and a nearly whispered first-person confession, then accumulates: bass harmonica, pedal steel, piccolo trumpet, and finally that colossal cannon-shot snare in the "lie-la-lie" refrain, an explosion recorded in an elevator shaft that arrives like grief detonating. Garfunkel's harmony floats above Simon's plainer lead, and the blend has a hymnal purity that makes the squalor of the lyric land harder. The narrator is a poor boy in New York, taking the workman's wages, seeking out the whores on Seventh Avenue for warmth rather than sex, and finally becoming the fighter who remains standing out of stubbornness alone. Simon wrote it partly as a response to critics, but its self-pity dissolves into something more universal — endurance without triumph. The wordless refrain does what words can't, a cry that means nothing and therefore everything. Play it walking home through a cold city, when the day has taken more than it gave and you're still, somehow, upright.