Track Listing

1. I Am A Rock
2. Leaves That Are Green
3. A Church Is Burning
4. April Come She Will
5. The Sound Of Silence
6. A Most Peculiar Man
7. He Was My Brother
8. Kathy's Song
9. The Side Of A Hill
10. A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)
11. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall
12. Patterns
13. I Am A Rock (alternate version)
14. A Church Is Burning (alternate version)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11882 in Music
• Released on: 2004-03-22
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

An Early Document From aSeminal Songwriter (4.5 stars)
I too had heard about the existence of these masters and, although I love and respect Paul Simon's body of work, did not think enough of it to check it out right away. Well ... I'm certainly sorry I waited as long as I have.
Listening to this CD will give you the kind of insight into an artist that you may only get from his or her private notebooks, a sense of looking at notes that may still change but were important enough to be written down when they were, a diary of a young man who must express the outrage or tenderness he's found in the world around him.
You don't have to be a completist or be writing a PhD dissertation on Simon, to own this CD. I'd argue that if you've never heard Simon & Garfunkel you may still be thanking your stars for having discovered the treasures that are included here.
This is not to say that the latter versions with Art Garfunkel are to be forgotten, of course, but that these takes ought to be listened to as the roots of the glorious recordings they created together. Actually, I'd go as far as to say that many of their classics would not be have been such without Artie's breathtaking voice.
This album is full of gems, played with a minimum of instrumentation and without any kind of pretentiousness. "I Am A Rock" sounds angrier and reveals an edge to the words I did not ever get from the famous duo's versions; "A Most Peculiar Man" and "Kathy's Song" are bound to thaw your heart; and "A Church Is Burning" or "A Simple Desultory Philippic" although naive, somewhat the sentimental fury of a young man, will move you with their honesty.
These are not outtakes, the often incomplete, unrealized stuff that gets added to reissued classic albums, that clearly proves why it was buried in vaults for a long time. This is an early album, a set of songs that was meant to be heard, by one of the most important singer-songwriters in popular music. Astute and tender, at times naive but not asleep to the times he witnessed as a young artist.

Beauty, on disc
If, like me, the draw of Simon and Garfunkel is not the soaring tenor of the latter, nor even their perfect harmonies, but more the elegant, melodic beauty of Paul Simon's singing, song-writing and acoustic guitar picking, then this album is for you. Many songs sound better here than on the S+G studio albums that followed without the uneeded over-arrangements. This is how Paul Simon must have sounded when he was "on a tour of one night stands", in England, back in the early sixties. I'm lucky that my dad has the original LP. But I can't wait to buy my own - it'll be well worth it. Paul Simon says on the sleeve: "The words I write today will not be mine tomorrow". But they (and his melodies) are still poignant, beautiful and moving even today.......

At last!!
Every year before Christmas, I enter the words "Paul Simon Songbook" into the Amazon searchbox. And this year I got a result! I have the album on lp, which I copied to cassette tape years ago. Last year I made a copy of the tape onto CD, but the sound qulity is fairly poor. Finally, here is the CD version. It is a wonderful, simple and very sincere album, the first one I ever bought. It reflects the magic of those years in the sixties. And it is great to hear early accousitc versions of later hits.