Homeward Bound

"I received this long, handwritten letter from a guy who lived on some island in South Carolina. I remember it was like this long catharsis, flashbacks of his life in song, my songs. He went through every concert he attended, starting with one he went to with his first date ever while in high school in 1966 at the University of Detroit. Artie and I still remember that gig, it was one of our first big venue college concerts and we were scared shitless. When the curtain opened and we saw a full house, Artie and I knew something had changed for us, we were real singers now and that too scared us shitless. This guy wrote about how we was on his first real date and how by the end of the concert, he said that, "she had fallen in love with me...or maybe it was you.," But it didn't matter to him, he wrote something like, "it was close enough." To know you have that kind of effect on people, while it is flattering, it's something I never intended. I'm just a songwriter, a singer playing my songs and all I ever cared about back then was entertaining. He went on about the songs that he said affected his life, something I hear a lot. Then he ended with remembering the last concert he went to, in Atlanta in the late 80s. It was at another college venue, Georgia Tech. Artie and I had both gone solo back then, maybe for at least 20 years. I think it was on our first Simon and Garfunkel reunion tour. This guy's father had died a few weeks earlier and he wrote about how he just lost it when we did Homeward Bound, one of the encores on those reunion tours. His words, his intense emotion, he took me back to my youth, my mom and dad. He touched me. I thought to myself, "We're even." - Paul Simon, Interview in The New Yorker, 2003.