27

America

music and words by Paul Simon

‘AMERICA’ IS A SONG ABOUT searching. The lyrics tell us we have ‘walked off to look for America’, then later ‘They’ve all come to look for America’. But the song itself is also searching. For one thing, it’s searching for a rhyme it never finds. And, in the end, it doesn’t find America either, only the New Jersey Turnpike.

‘America’ appeared on Simon & Garfunkel’s penultimate studio album Bookends, released on 3 April 1968, the day before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This was followed two months later by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and both the album and the song gained an added poignancy from those and other contemporary events: in August, there was rioting and violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; in September, as the war in Vietnam dragged on, the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive; in November, Richard Nixon won the presidential election with a large majority of the electoral college, but only forty-three per cent of the popular vote. ‘Kathy, I’m lost,’ Paul Simon sang. That year, a lot of Americans felt the same.

There really was a Kathy, and she’d already had a song to herself – ‘Kathy’s Song’ on Sounds of Silence. She was Kathy Chitty, Simon’s girlfriend, with whom he went on a brief road trip in 1964. In ‘America’, the trip takes Simon from Saginaw, Michigan, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he and Kathy board a Greyhound that ends up on the New Jersey Turnpike, heading into New York.

As with ‘Stardust’ and ‘I Got Rhythm’, the absence of rhymes keeps ‘America’ moving, but it’s not so much purposeful forward motion in this song as drifting. ‘America’ has an unconventional structure that increases this peripatetic effect and adds to the story in various ways. It’s worth exploring this in some detail. Take the opening:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together

I’ve got some real estate here in my bag

So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs Wagner pies,

And walked off to look for America.

The first line has a perfectly ordinary melody, almost folk-like, an impression enhanced by its lilting 6/8 metre. The sinking bass line and attendant chords are straightforward too: D–D/C sharp–B minor–D/A–G. We heard them first in the hummed introduction, and now they underpin the beginning of the song, one for each stress of the opening line. But the second line comes up short – it only has four stresses – and the chords stop even before that, leaving us hanging in B minor. It’s the first of several reverie moments in this rather cinematic song.

The third line is totally unexpected. Direct speech has given way to reportage, and as it does so, we find ourselves suddenly in F sharp minor. It’s not that the chord is so remote (Schubert would have been happy with this modulation, though perhaps without the added seventh), but that we find ourselves here so quickly, the song barely underway. Then, as we walk off ‘to look for America’ in the fourth line, we’re suddenly back in B minor.

At the start of the second verse, as the lovers get on the Greyhound, we find ourselves once more in the home key of D, while a distant organ decorates the melody. But the second line takes us back to B minor, to another moment of reverie. This time it’s in the lyrics, too: Simon telling Kathy that Michigan now ‘seems like a dream’.

And so to what passes for the song’s chorus. (It’s really only the fourth line of the verse, and we’ve already heard it once at the end of the first verse, but this time it is a little more insistent and we begin to notice it more.) We move via the dominant A to E major (the dominant of the dominant), then the home key of D, but with a dissonant C sharp in the melody on the elongated second syllable of ‘A–ME–rica’.

The middle eight proper takes us to C major and to some light relief. A playful flute bubbles away as the lovers laugh and joke about their fellow passenger, ‘the man in the gabardine suit’. But the mood dissipates. There’s a sense of deflation and pointlessness on this return to the tonic D. A cigarette? No, we’ve smoked them. He just looks out of the window while she reads, and when that ‘chorus’ comes around the moment is subverted. This time there’s nothing about America, just a moon rising ‘over an open field’.

Back to the tonic D for the final verse and the drums kick in further. But while D major might be the song’s harmonic home, the singer says he’s ‘lost’. He tells Kathy this, even though he knows she’s sleeping. Has he perhaps waited until she was asleep?

‘I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why,’ he adds, the last three words drawn out in frustration over the B minor chord. The reverie, then, is also subverted and he’s reduced to ‘counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike’.

But it’s not all despair. The single-line chorus returns at the end of this final verse, and it’s repeated. The D major chord, with the C sharp on ‘A–ME–rica’, is practically triumphant, Art Garfunkel’s voice riding high above it all with its descant.

That’s not quite the end of the song, though. The organ plays us out – it might be a fairground waltz – as ‘America’ fades away, Kathy still asleep and her boyfriend counting cars.