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.
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.
It’s 70 percent singing of songs and 30 percent reading of these things that I have been writing.
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.
‘Bridge Over Troubled Water.’ It’s sung well, and it’s produced beautifully.
I’m proud of my family; they’re beauties (he and his wife, Kathryn Luce Garfunkel, have two sons: James, 28, and Beau, 13).
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.
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.
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.