Bridge Over Troubled Water (song)
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"Bridge Over Troubled Water"
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"Bridge Over Troubled Water" is the title song of Simon & Garfunkel's album of the same name. The single was released on January 26, 1970, though it also appears on the live album Live 1969, released in 2008. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on February 28, 1970, and stayed at the top of the chart for six weeks. "Bridge Over Troubled Water" also topped the adult contemporary chart in the U.S. for six weeks. The single has sold 6 million copies worldwide.
This song's recording process exposed many of the underlying tensions that eventually led to the breakup of the duo after the album's completion. Most notably, Paul Simon has repeatedly expressed regret over his insistence that Art Garfunkel sing his song as a solo, as it focused attention on Garfunkel and relegated Simon to a secondary position. Art Garfunkel initially did not want to sing lead vocal, feeling it was not right for him. "He felt I should have done it," Paul Simon revealed to Rolling Stone in 1972.
Garfunkel said that the moment when he performed it at a 1972 Madison Square Garden benefit concert, as part of a one-off reunion with Simon, was "almost biblical."
In performances on the 2003 "Old Friends" tour, Simon and Garfunkel took turns singing alternate verses of the vocal.
Rolling Stone named it number 47 on The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Read more about Bridge Over Troubled Water (song): Writing and Recording, Chart Performance, Awards, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Linda Clifford, Other Notable Covers
Famous quotes containing the words bridge, troubled and/or water:
“It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O, my soul.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The bread-winner must toil as in the fruitless effort of a troubled dream while the expenditure of an uneducated wife discounts the income in the lack of understanding to discern the broad possibilities of an intelligent economy.”
—Anna Eugenia Morgan (1845–1909)
“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man: wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)