Art Garfunkel is rebuilding bridges with Paul Simon

Art Garfunkel recently revealed he’d had lunch with his erstwhile friend, Paul Simon, after years of on-and-off estrangement. “It was a great experience,” he now tells The Independent, saying it “was so great to relive” their days as Simon & Garfunkel because “it had been years since we were together.” The pair had last performed together in 2010, though their feud has waxed and waned since 1970. In 2015, Garfunkel stoked the flames of resentment when he called his collaborator an “idiot” and a “jerk” for walking away from their successful partnership. 

“I thought I would stir things up and not be so soft on the image of Simon & Garfunkel,” he admits to The Independent. “So I was a little spicy, and it was foolish. It hurt his feelings. He said, ‘It’s not so much that you were a victim of the British press, it’s that I thought you wanted to hurt me.’ He said that; I realized, he’s right. I did want to hurt him. The truth is, I was competitive—and I burst into tears. There were hugs and tears; it was an emotional release.”

In his own interviews on the subject of their breakup, Simon has said Garfunkel’s burgeoning acting career in the ’70s disrupted their work. “We had an uneven partnership because I was writing all of the songs and basically running the sessions,” he said in the documentary In Restless Dreams: The Music Of Paul Simon (via New York Daily News). “Artie would be in the control room with [producer] Roy [Halee], and he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s good, let’s do that,’ but it was an uneven balance of power.” Speaking with Howard Stern in 2023, Simon noted that most musical duos tend to split up anyway, and their differing taste would have split them apart regardless of Garfunkel’s Hollywood side hustle. “We were friends since we were 12 years old, but our musical inclinations are quite different, and so we would have disagreements, and the disagreements could be, you know, real arguments that could stop a session cold,” he recalled.

For The Independent, Garfunkel now says any lingering frustrations about their breakup are “a think of the past,” so much so that a reunion is not out of the question. “We’ll see. I don’t know if he’s in the mood to work with me. I’m in the mood to work with him.” The artist even mused that they could do a residency together: “You move into Vegas and you stay put for a while. They come to you. You remove the traveling part of singing; it’s a better formula… I don’t want to be on the road and do show after show.” Perhaps the Simon & Garfunkel fandom will reunite at the Sphere!