The Song Paul Simon “Loathes” and Has Only Played as a Punishment for a Live Blunder

It’s not uncommon for a musician to come to dislike their material. No one has a perfect track record. Even a formidable songwriter like Paul Simon has a few songs he’d rather forget. One such song is Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” Simon doesn’t often play this song live. One of the only times he has was to repay the audience for a mistake-filled performance.

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The Song Paul Simon “Loathes” and Has Only Played as a Punishment for a Live Blunder

Simon wrote “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” as he was coming out of a depression in the mid-’60s. Because of this, the song feels like opening a window for the first time after days of rain. It’s clear he was having a change of heart.

“I started to swing out of it,” Simon once said. “I was getting into a good mood, and I remember coming home in the morning about six o’clock over the 59th Street Bridge in New York, and it was such a groovy day really, a good one, and it was one of those times when you know you won’t be tired for about an hour, a sort of a good hanging time, so I started to write a song that later became the ’59th Street Bridge Song or ‘Feelin’ Groovy,’”

For whatever reason, Simon grew to hate this song after he and Garfunkel broke up. He hasn’t gone into too much detail about why he soured on “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” but he once made his feelings clear during a concert at Portland, Oregan in 2018.

“Song I Loathe”

When you have a catalog as vast as Simon’s it can be hard to remember every song in perfect detail. During this 2018 concert, Simon all but forgot the lyrics to “The Cool, Cool River.” In order to make it up to the fans, Simon decided to play “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”

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“Because I made a mistake and forgot the lyrics to that song,” Simon says in the clip below. “I’m going to penalise myself. I’m going to sing one of my songs that I loathe. This will teach me, because I just — I hate this song.”

While we don’t share Simon’s sympathies towards this song, it’s always nice when an artist puts their fans first.

(Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)