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Art Garfunkel will bring his singular voice to the Tarrytown Music Hall on Aug 10 for a roughly 80-minute musical performance, interspersed with readings from his collection of musings in his 2017 book, What Is It All but Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man. Here, the multi-Grammy winner and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductee answers a few of our questions.
When did you realize you had a special talent?
I was 5 years old. I was already singing to myself in the alleyway between the brick buildings in my neighborhood in Queens. I was hearing that I had a gift and it was fun to warble the vocal cords, and I soon found that echo is the key. That was a big friend to my singing and that combination made me feel I was really good at this. So what got me started is reverb, baby.
What can you tell us about your show?
It’s 70 percent singing of songs and 30 percent reading of these things that I have been writing.
How do you structure the set list?
You finish a song and you imagine you’re the audience and you go, ‘What wants to come next?’ Should we give them a big fat hit right now? Is it time to make the rhythm jump a little? And fortunately, I have a lot of these hits to deal with it. My audience is older, they know ‘Scarborough Fair,’ they want to hear it.
What song are you most proud of?
‘Bridge Over Troubled Water.’ It’s sung well, and it’s produced beautifully.
And in your personal life?
I’m proud of my family; they’re beauties (he and his wife, Kathryn Luce Garfunkel, have two sons: James, 28, and Beau, 13).
You’ve accomplished so much. Are your bucket list items all ticked off?
I have not let it rip. There are places I’ve not been to. I find traveling is really bulky and getting tough, but I still have great curiosity to live and to burn with my curiosity. So it’s a contradiction — just when it’s tougher is when I most want to be connected to the world.
What inspired you to write a book?
I was never inspired to write a book. I wrote because it started coming to me. I knew of a book publisher who wanted to see what I was writing, and he said, ‘I think you have a book here.’ And I responded… Maybe there is a commercial side to what I’ve been doing all along. Maybe I’ve been writing all this stuff to somebody like the world at large.
What’s next for you?
I’m one of these people who believes you don’t do a new elsewhere thing unless you are tired of what you are doing, and I am nowhere near that. I feel like somebody who got his voice back a few years ago and put together a show with a couple guys, and now we are refining this show, so I am early in that game.