Genre
Folk pop and soft rock. Garfunkel's debut solo album is essentially a recital - eleven carefully curated songs by other writers (Jimmy Webb, Randy Newman, Van Morrison, Paul Williams and Roger Nichols) - in which the selection itself is the artistic statement and Garfunkel's uniquely luminous tenor is the sole unifying element.
Release
Released on September 11, 1973, by Columbia Records. The title is taken from the name of a character in Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
Production
Produced by Roy Halee and Art Garfunkel. The session musicians included Larry Carlton, Dean Parks, and Louie Shelton on guitar, Joe Osborn on bass, Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon on drums, Larry Knechtel on keyboards, Jack Schroer and Jules Broussard on saxophone, and the St. Mary's Choir. Strings were arranged by Ernie Freeman, Jimmy Haskell, and Peter Matz. Notably, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead contributed a lead guitar overdub on "Down in the Willow Garden" and Paul Simon sang harmony on the final verse of the same track. The album was recorded at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
Reception
The album peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and produced Garfunkel's only US top-ten solo single, "All I Know," alongside two further top-40 hits, "I Shall Sing" and "Traveling Boy."The Rolling Stone review praised the album's lush production and Garfunkel's 'choirboy loveliness', while noting a tendency to impose excessive orchestral beauty on material that resists it. Garfunkel's vocal arrangements were widely admired.
Art Garfunkel
Arthur Ira Garfunkel (born November 5, 1941, Forest Hills, Queens, New York) is an American singer, poet, and actor, best known as the higher voice of Simon & Garfunkel, one of the most celebrated duos in the history of popular music. A childhood friend of Paul Simon in Queens, the two first performed together as Tom & Jerry in 1956, reuniting in 1964 to record "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M". Their subsequent partnership produced a series of iconic albums. The duo has sold over 100 million records. Following the pair's first dissolution, Garfunkel pursued a parallel acting career with roles in "Catch-22" (1970) and "Carnal Knowledge" (1971). As a solo artist he produced six studio albums, with "Bright Eyes" from the Watership Down soundtrack (1979) becoming his biggest solo hit — number one in the UK for six weeks.
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