Album: Bookends
Year: 1966
. . .
“A Hazy Shade of Winter” was originally recorded for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album, but at some point, they decided to instead release it as a single, perhaps figuring that a more rock-and-roll oriented song would do better than their previous single, the chamber-pop “The Dangling Conversation,” which was their first single not to go top 5, stalling out at a (relatively) dismal 25.
And so, based upon a cooly dynamic Paul Simon guitar riff and a relentless double-time drum part by Hal Blaine — which either he or Art Garfunkel augmented by stealing the tink-tink-tink three-beat tambourine offbeat from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” giving the whole thing the satisfying thwacka-thwacka-tink-tink-tink, thwacka-thwacka-tink-tink-tink which drove the earlier song.
Meanwhile, Simon & Garfunkel are singing about the fading of the autumn, which might also be a metaphor for getting old, even though Paul Simon was all of 25:
Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
I was so hard to please
The riff goes away during the verses, but the choruses are pretty sparse: just guitar, drums, bass, tambourine — and of course the vocals, which are a bit clipped, tough and angry.
But look around
Leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter
It’s also a pretty dynamic arrangement: there are stop-time parts with cool runs from bassist Joe Osborn, quick horn bleats, Simon mixing up the lyrics of one of the chorus to sing about it being the springtime of his life, and a really cool outro with some nice keyboard work from Larry Knechtel as Simon & Garfunkel chant:
Look around
Leaves are brown
There’s a patch of snow on the ground…
Look around
Leaves are brown
There’s a patch of snow on the ground…
Look around
Leaves are brown
There’s a patch of snow on the ground…
It feels like a surefire top ten, and while it did better than “The Dangling Conversation,” it still stalled out at #13 in the U.S., and was eventually collected on 1968’s Bookends.
And of course, two decades later, the Bangles doubled down on the psychedelic elements, amped up the guitar riff and rode their fully harmonized version — from the cooler-than-thou Less Than Zero soundtrack — all the way to #2.
“A Hazy Shade of Winter”
“A Hazy Shade of Winter” live in New York, 2003
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