Sequencing is the trick

(Don't ask where I've been for the last 3 months. I'm back and you're in for a good summer's worth of posts...)

It's been said that editing and score are post-production procedures that can make or break a movie. I'd like to think that good acting, direction by a storyteller rather than a moneymaker and hey, what about a great script to kick the project off all rank in there somewhere as well.

When comes to albums (collections of songs, folks), sequencing really helps as well. Most people who like The Smiths huzzah The Queen is Dead over the other studio albums, but the pacing doesn't work for me as well as let's say, Meat is Murder. But that's just me.

As I was rummaging through some old albums and box sets, I stumbled upon Paul Simon's 1964-1993 that was put out right around the time he was doing some career retrospective shows at the Paramount Theater in NYC.

The box is a good collection - although, quite sacrilegiously, they offer a live "Still Crazy After All These Years" vastly inferior to the original. But there is a sequence of tracks on Disc One that is simply breathtaking. It's so well done that it can't help but call attenttion to itself and you think on it and say, "Wow - there's the hand of something stronger at work here." And like all good things should, it demands that you review your thoughts on the subject and pay more attention the next time around. If anyone wants me to, I can "get" the tracks to you so you can decide on your own.

"Bridge Over Troubled Water" (demo) - Paul sings this demo - it's got different lyrics. And as the case is when we hear demos retroactively, we can simultaneously see where the official version came from and marvel at the changes production can wring.

"Bridge Over Troubled Water" - the masterwork, from their 1970 swansong album. I believe it's the most covered song from the latter half of the 1960s, though I need citations, please. Garfunkel's voice is angelic, for sure, but Paul coming in to share the final verse puts this one right over the top. The song of healing the 1960s needed after Woodstock begat Altamont.

"The Breakup" - a humorous little piece of studiosity from 1973, this finds Garfunkel (with recording room punch-ins from Simon) attempting to explain the necessity of their dissolved partnership.

"Hey Little Schoolgirl" - and then, we're slammed back to 1957 for the earliest recorded track of their career, when they were known only as 'Tom and Jerry'.

"My Little Town" - hard jump 20 years to the 'comeback' single from 1975, a lyrically dissonant ode to hating the town you come from. Oddly (or maybe not so oddly) not about Queens... Interesting to note how the entire song is sung by the two in unison.

And there you have it, a time-hopping abbreviated history of the duo.