America. Simon and Garfunkel. 1968. Columbia.

 It’s utterly gratifying that the mystery of Simon and Garfunkel’s America goes unresolved. If the aching emptiness—the same trait that goes on to haunt many of the characters of Simon’s songs—were any more clearly defined, it wouldn’t be ours. That indefinability also gives America the scope of a national mythology; so do many of the song’s details. The empty pack of cigarettes, the open field, the roll call of states, even Joe Osborne’s bass guitar, which fixes the steady motion of the Greyhound bus for the listener, the intermittent rumble and echo of Hal Blaine’s majestic drum breaks, and Larry Knechtel’s keyboards that give America its coda; these elements in combination solidified Simon’s role as the country’s second greatest living architect of twentieth century mythologies, big and small, in pop music. He is the Big Apple songwriter who absorbed so much of his country’s corrupting and sanguine energies because many of its dramas were enacted just outside of his front door. America survives with us into this new century because of what four years in the recording studio had taught Simon & Garfunkel. The song is a step or two back from the folk influences that defined the duo early in their career; it was clearly a move towards deepening their evolving relationship with the mass pop audience acclaim had gained them. Like A Day in the Life, another powerful sixties number about managing your expectations in a world that increasingly insists you shed them altogether, America’s declaration of meaninglessness is also an artful appeal to your sympathy and intelligence. It simply asks that you remain turned on.