Bridge Over Troubled Rankings: Moving From Comparison to Communion

Introduction

In the winter of 2018, my cousin called to say Paul Simon had just announced his final tour. Curious, I went online and read the statement myself. At 76, after 50+ years of touring and the loss of his longtime guitarist, he wrote that it felt like a relief to recognize it was time. He still loved making music, but the endless movement could end. I found his words moving.

Scrolling down, I read a comment beneath the article:

“Poor old Paul. He’s always lived in the shadow of Bob Dylan.”

It hit a nerve.

Part of me understood — I’d seen the same comparisons in countless “Top Songwriters” lists, where Dylan typically takes the top spot and Paul Simon sits somewhere below. I noticed myself getting prickly, muttering about how “stupid” those rankings are. But if Simon were at the top, I’d probably beam with pride and tell everyone what a smart list it was.

Why is that?

Storytime

I’ve been a music therapist for many years. Music is more than work for me — it is conspicuously present most times when I have the feeling of being "on purpose". And Paul Simon’s music has been stitched into the fabric of my life for as long as I can remember.

I once saw him live with a small group of fans lingering by the stage after the show. He returned without a guitar, just to say a quiet goodbye. He was only a few feet away — I could have spoken to him in a normal voice. But I hesitated, trying to find the perfect thing to say. By the time I had it, he was gone. It was:

“Your music is the reason I am a songwriter.”

Simon’s melodies, lyrics, rhythms, and the sheer artistry of his production have shaped me for decades — maybe even before I was born. My parents walked down the aisle to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” When I got married (the first of hopefully many more times😜), I paddled up in a canoe to a loop I made of “Can’t Run But.” At five years old, I remember a joyful multi-generational dance party to “You Can Call Me Al,” everyone swept into the same pulse.

In my teens, the String Cheese Incident covered “Under African Skies” at a concert, and it lit up the night. I bought Graceland the next day. Over 20 years later, I still play it regularly, along with much of his post-Graceland catalogue.

One night, my friends and I saw him at the Toronto Amphitheater. Rain poured. We danced in the muddy grass. At one moment — just as the clouds broke and the brass section exploded — a flock of pigeons soared out from under the canopy. It was pure magic. A shared, ecstatic experience.

Another show, a few years later, was a seated affair with an older crowd. I stood alone against the back wall, the only one dancing. Then came “Graceland.” As he sang, “and sometimes when she’s falling, flying, tumbling in turmoil,” a woman in a shawl stood, arms raised, and twirled down the aisle. Before the song was over, the room came alive. Many more joined her, leaving their seats to dance in the aisles.

And then there was the time at a yoga ashram tucked in the trees at the base of a mountain.  We practiced speech awareness, we ate in silence, and the only music we heard was our own chanting of mantras and singing of devotional songs. One day, I found a cassette in my mailbox — Graceland. A mysterious, perfect gift. We played it that night on the old ghetto blaster in the library.  The music entered and enlivened us in an almost shocking way. We danced and sang into the night, feeling the connective magic and revelatory beauty in the music at a deeper level than ever before.

A couple years after that I was sitting alone at the kitchen table of the farmhouse I had grown up in. I had been back here for a couple months after four years away in intensive self-study. I had been celibate for a couple years, distrustful of lust and neediness, and inspired by spiritual paths the world over. I was listening to his most recent album, Surprise. The last song came on, “Father And Daughter”. The tenderness in his voice, the sensitive interplay of guitars, the quiet certainty of the drums — it broke me open. I wept heavily. It brought me to my humanness; my belonging in the tender fabric of life and my need for connection. It was a call to heal the wounds left by the messy and disorienting dissolution of my parent’s marriage, and my own painful and traumatic first attempts at relationship.

Reflection

And where was Bob Dylan in all of this?

Nowhere.

This isn’t about whether Paul Simon is “better” than Bob Dylan. This is about the trap of comparison itself.

Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian analyst, called it statistical thinking — where we place more value in public opinion than in personal experience. Where we let numbers and rankings shape what we think is meaningful.

It’s easy to want the things we love to not just be great — but the greatest. I used to argue about this stuff like my life depended on it. And maybe it did — in the sense that I was looking for external validation to legitimize my inner world.

“Validate my experience — because I’m struggling to do it myself.”

Von Franz suggests that the antidote to this is valuing our own feelings. It sounds simple. But it’s not. It’s daily, moment-to-moment work.

My anger at these rankings suggests a deeper, existential unrest: am I enough? do I matter?  When I catch myself spiraling — I return to my body. To breath, to ground, to the hum of actual life. I move from imagined rankings to real presence. And that saves me every time.

In Conclusion

Does Paul Simon spend his days moping around, feeling like Bob Dylan’s understudy? Maybe sometimes. Maybe not. I hope not.

Or does he feel his feet on the floor, the warm spring breeze on his cheek, elation at the sound of his children’s laughter, the powerful pulsing of love in his veins, and delight as his band brings to life his creative impulses?

The question is: where are we placing our attention?

Being the master of your attention is a practice. Mindfulness helps. So does therapy. So does turning off media that profits from keeping you distracted and comparing. Most of all, what helps is learning to trust the truth of your own experience.

And that is the heart of this essay: not comparison, but communion.

Songs

“Bridge Over Troubled Water” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNDti7t5k1s this certainly wasn't the version my parents walked down the aisle to, but is the 2018 reinvention)

“Can’t Run But” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znfNpN6rfoM

String Cheese Incident, covering “Under African Skies” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcpKPybpC3c

Graceland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VTcBO4q5kY

Father and Daughter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DSW-VWDGXc)