‘Why not try to be the best in the world, just for the fun of it?’ Art Garfunkel on a wealthy, stressed life – and reconciling with Paul Simon | Pop and rock

As Art Garfunkel is eager to level out, “I am a singer – there, use that as the title of your article” – however he was by no means simply a singer. “I’ve been an actor. I am a writer,” he continues. “I’ve walked across countries, taken freighters across oceans. I’ve read the dictionary. I’ve read two books a month for 60 years: Darwin, Herodotus, Balzac, Proust, Tolstoy. I’ve taught maths. I have two great kids and I’m a grandfather, but it always does seem to come back to the singing.”

Which is comprehensible, provided that in Simon and Garfunkel (with songwriter Paul Simon) he offered extra albums than another pop duo in historical past. Garfunkel’s oft-called “angelic” tones powered traditional chart-toppers together with The Sound of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Water, and he grew to become a profitable solo artist. However, till a 12 months in the past, he was hardly singing in any respect and hadn’t toured since 2019. “I found myself lying on a pillow in a dream state, thinking about the meaning of being alive,” he reveals. “What is my day? What am I supposed to do with myself?”

He realised that the 2 issues that had made him happiest have been assembly his spouse, Kathryn, in 1985, and singing, particularly the purpose throughout a present when “it becomes effortless, and you reach this high point of pure joy”. So a pal who labored at an artwork gallery north of New York advised he may strive singing and telling tales to an viewers of 60 folks, and see the way it felt. “It worked,” Garfunkel enthuses. “After three nights, I thought: I’ll get back to doing this.”

Thus, on the age of 84, the polymath is again on the street – he involves the UK in October – and “singing much more than I have done in two decades”. He made the album Father and Son together with his son Art Jr two years in the past, and even sang Bridge Over Troubled Water shortly earlier than chatting with me. “In the bathtub at the hotel,” he chuckles, “because there’s reverb, and I sang it as good as I ever sang it in the 60s.”

His most up-to-date launch is Authorship, a observe on a compilation created by the expertise firm Eleven Labs, which has created an AI mannequin for producing “original compositions” in collaboration with artists. Authorship contains a spoken excerpt from Garfunkel’s 2017 memoir What Is It All But Luminous over an AI-generated piano backing. Not that he appears to have had an excessive amount of involvement with the expertise. “I think my new management like my writing and wanted to do something with it,” he explains. “I’m the only person left in America without a computer or the internet.”

So we’re talking on a crackly cellphone line, which provides his dulcet tones an otherworldly high quality as he talks in regards to the first time he sang, aged 5, in 1946. “I used to sing along to the radio,” he remembers. “Then one day I walked out of kindergarten – the stairwell had lovely reverb – and started singing to myself. I had goosebumps because my voice was pretty. I was having more fun than I’d ever known and I realised: I’m a singer.”

Garfunkel gave his first public efficiency in a expertise present in fourth grade. Simon, who was in his 12 months on the identical faculty, was watching. The pair quickly grew to become “really tight, laughing all the time”, recording their harmonies within the Garfunkels’ basement in Queens, New York, on a wire recorder. “This is before tape,” he says. “We’d record our harmonies and then put another layer on top. We were very young, but learning to produce.”

Aged 16, in 1957, they’d their first hit as Tom & Jerry with Hey, Schoolgirl and carried out on American Bandstand. “We followed Jerry Lee Lewis, who did Great Balls of Fire,” Garfunkel remembers. “He was a wild man. I remember going to the urinal before going on. One of the dancers asked: ‘Who have we got on today?’ And someone else said: ‘Some jerks calling themselves Tom & Jerry.’ I just stood there, saying nothing.”

Tom & Jerry didn’t final and Garfunkel returned to training, the place he attained a BA and an MA, and labored in direction of a arithmetic PhD: “I’d have had to go into the army if I hadn’t stayed in college, so that’s what kept me.” However, Simon and Garfunkel had the final chortle when The Sound of Silence rocketed up the charts. “I watched it climb from No 91. When it got to No 5, I called Paul” – who was touring English people golf equipment on the time. “‘Paul, the thing we’ve wanted all our lives has happened. You gotta come home.’ The next week we jumped to No 1.”

It was the primary of many chart-toppers. By his personal admission, Garfunkel discovered the Sixties “wonderful”. He remembers “social evenings with each of the four Beatles. George Harrison took me to his castle, which had a four-storey papier-mache model of the Alps in the back yard. I think the person he’d bought the place from was a bit eccentric.” Garfunkel was additionally “a workaholic who lived in the studio”, the place he laid down an astonishing 300 takes for Bridge Over Troubled Water. “Whatever you do, you gotta do it well,” he shrugs. “Why not try to be the best in the world, just for the fun of it?”

However, by 1970 the duo hit troubled waters themselves. In his memoir, Garfunkel admits that he by no means actually forgave Simon for making a single with out him in 1958. Conversely, in Alex Gibney’s 2023 documentary In Restless Dreams, Simon confesses to a “Freudian trauma” about Garfunkel’s vocals: “My mother said: ‘You have a good voice, but Arthur has a fine voice.’”

In 1967, the pair had been engaged on the soundtrack to The Graduate – which included Mrs Robinson, their second US No 1 – when the movie’s director, Mike Nichols, drove as much as Garfunkel’s lodgings in a limo, handed him a script for the satirical warfare comedy Catch-22 and mentioned: “Read this. I see you as an actor, as Lt Nately.”

“I’d never acted and was so nervous,” Garfunkel remembers. “But Mike was maybe the most interesting man I ever met and made me feel good, like: ‘At last someone is treating me like the bright fellow I am.’ I was worried about how it would work out socially with all these big, real actors: Alan Arkin, Orson Welles, Jon Voight. But I flew down to Mexico and did a good enough job for Mike to want me to star in his next film, Carnal Knowledge [1971], with Jack Nicholson and Candice Bergen. Jack’s terrific. We still speak from time to time.”

As with music, Garfunkel gave appearing “my full concentration, really quite extreme at times”, however Simon grew pissed off together with his absences and the duo by no means recorded collectively once more. After the break up Garfunkel grew to become, of all issues, a maths instructor.

“I wanted to drop out and be normal and live life,” he explains. So he moved to small-town Litchfield, Connecticut, “and I got a job. On the first day of class I told them: I know you all think you’re meeting a celebrity, and I can relate to that, but I want to teach you geometry.” He made a pact that on the final day of time period they might ask him something they wished, however admits: “I wasn’t very good [at teaching maths]. I know my stuff but I couldn’t motivate them. I didn’t know how to get people to care.”

So after six months he left, quickly afterwards marrying his first spouse, Linda Grossman (they divorced in 1975). He spent the remainder of the 70s appearing and making “three nice albums”: Angel Clare, Breakaway and Watermark. He notched up the UK’s bestselling single of 1979 with Bright Eyes, the theme from the movie Watership Down, however the decade ended with a bump.

The identical 12 months, he starred in Bad Timing, director Nic Roeg’s darkish psychological drama by which a troubled younger lady kills herself. While Garfunkel was filming in Vienna, Laurie Bird, his associate since 1975 and who’s on two of his album covers, took a deadly overdose of Valium in his condominium in New York, aged 25. Even now, 47 years later, he finds this tough to speak about. “Do I have to revisit it, Dave? My worst year?” But finally he says: “I don’t know how to describe her other than that she was quiet, into herself, beautiful. I was in love with her. It took me years to get over that.”

For a number of years, he walked away from music – actually. In 1982, in Japan, he “hatched the idea of leaving my old life behind and walking across the country. I stashed my stuff and started walking. Twelve miles later I looked for a place to stay. It’s crazy, but I was walking something off.”

He subsequently walked throughout the US and Europe, starting “across Central Park and my alma mater, Columbia University, and up the George Washington Bridge. In Europe, I started in western Ireland at Shannon airport, crossed Ireland in eight days and took a ferry to south-west Wales. I passed Dylan Thomas’s house, came to England and then crossed the Channel.” He chuckles. “You know, I’m the son of a travelling salesman. He sold winter coats.”

In the Appalachian mountains, Garfunkel sang to cows: “They heard me singing, and just walked down the hill.” Wonderfully, when he was stopped by cops in Wyoming, he recited Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. “They rolled down the window,” he says. “You know that tone of voice they have: ‘What are you doing, sir?’ I found myself saying: ‘Every American has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So I am in the pursuit of happiness, officer.’ And they said: ‘Uh, we were just checking, sir. You get strange folk out here.’” Eventually, he walked off the darkish clouds: he married Kathryn Cermak, a mannequin, singer and actor, in 1988 and returned to music.

There have been sporadic reunions with Simon – most famously at New York’s Central Park in 1981, the place they sang to half 1,000,000 folks – however they final toured in 2010 after which stopped talking. Then, in 2025, Garfunkel revealed that they’d had dinner, hugs, he’d ended up in tears and so they’d made plans to satisfy once more.

“That was about a year ago and I haven’t seen him in the last year,” he says. But he’s curious to listen to about his outdated pal’s latest tour: “Did he speak much? How many musicians did he have?” However, he doesn’t want to talk about the seemingly unlikely prospect of one other tour collectively. “You know what I think is more interesting? Walking from western Ireland to Istanbul,” he says. “But yes, we got together. Who knows what the future will bring? Life is a surprise. I don’t know what happens next month. I don’t know what happens after we die.”

Garfunkel frets about large points, reminiscent of international heating, the human race and people in energy. “I don’t like America’s position at all,” he says. “I’m not aboard, and I’m thinking of leaving the country, frankly. It’s real that the planet is getting warmer, that the water’s rising, that so many people are starving. When Donald Trump took over Venezuela, are those the new rules? Just take over a country and run it? It’s shocking, and you think: how on earth are we gonna change the presidency? But Trump won’t last for ever. So we’ve got to hope.”

Meanwhile, two months in need of his eighty fifth birthday, he nonetheless has issues he’d like to do: “Sail around the world, see India and China, sing in South America.” But, he says pointedly, “I don’t wanna go into space.”

“I hope I come across as philosophical,” he concludes. “I’m a thinker, a book reader, a walker, but mostly I’m a singer. I’m always very nervous, behind the curtain. Then I walk out and hear the applause and I flip from fear to confidence right there.”