"Hazy Shade of Winter" By Simon & Garfunkel, Saturday, January 20, 2023 (rewritten post)

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel met in grade school in their hometown of Queens, New York. In fourth grade, Art sang in a talent show, which prompted Paul to want to be friends with him. Inspired by the early rock group The Everly Brothers, Paul and Art taught themselves how to harmonize. The duo wrote and recorded their first song at the age of 15, and then took up the moniker Tom & Jerry, while they were still in high school. Art took the name Tom Graph and Paul took up the name Simon Jerry Landis. The duo had a hit with the single “Hey School Girl” and even appeared on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Tom & Jerry signed to Big Records and during that time Paul Simon began recording solo songs, something Art Garfunkel resented. The duo went to college, Paul Simon studying literature and Queens College and Art Garfunkel studying architecture at Columbia University, and recorded solo songs while in college.

TIME, TIME, TIME, SEE WHAT'S BECOME OF ME? In 1964, Tom & Jerry rebranded to their now well-known moniker, Simon & Garfunkel. They recorded their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., though the record wouldn’t be a success until years later when a radio DJ started playing an alternate version of their originally acoustic track “The Sound of Silence.” Sony Records rushed the band to record a follow-up to Wednesday Morning, which featured the electrified version and the title of The Sound of Silence. Most of the songs on Silence were reworked tracks from The Paul Simon Song Book, Simon’s debut record in the UK, where he had lived since the failure of Wednesday Morning. The duo’s third record, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, though, featured mostly new recordings. And from the recording sessions of the duo’s third record, came their hit single “Hazy Shade of Winter.” The song was released as a non-album single but was included on their fourth album Bookends. Paul Simon wrote the lyrics, reflecting on his life in England. The song encapsulates the winter feeling of the young artist “sipping [his] vodka and lime” while “looking over manuscripts of unpublished rhyme.” And although Simon is still a young man 25 years old at the age of the song’s initial release, the brown leaves evoke the urgency of time.

HEAR THE SALVATION ARMY BAND DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE. “Hazy Shade of Winter” was a Billboard Hot 100 number 16 hit for Simon & Garfunkel. The song was recorded by The Bangles and reached number 2. The Bangles’ version electrifies Paul Simons’ acoustic riff, slightly akin to the way that “The Sound of Silence” added even more energy to Simon & Garfunkel’s original version. The cover was recorded for the 1987 film Less Than Zero. In 2019, Gerard Way and Ray Toro of My Chemical Romance recorded an even heavier rock version of “Hazy Shade of Winter” to be featured in a Netflix adaptation of Way’s comic, Umbrella Academy. The alternate-timeline dark-comedic drama utilized Classic Rock songs throughout the show’s run, but “Hazy Shade of Winter” was the first introduction to the series’ style as it was used in the trailer. While both rock versions of “Hazy” sound great, and hold an emotional closeness to me--The Bangles’ version from the second season of Ryan Murphey’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace--I think that the original captures the mood of an actual hazy, winter day. It’s the slow pace of an existential crisis. It’s the ugliness of January after winter has worn out its welcome after the joys of Christmas have left you with credit card bills you don’t want to pay back. It’s the distant hope in the lime juice sprinkled into vodka that somehow reminds you that springtime is coming eventually. A Moscow Mule may have only kept the depression of winter harboring in the poet’s soul.