Music Monday: The Boxer

This is the second Music Monday to feature a Simon and Garfunkel song, and it won’t be the last. “The Boxer” is from their fifth, final, and arguably greatest album, “Bridge over Troubled Water.” There’s one other song I want to discuss from “Bridge,” so I’ll save my comments and reflections on the album until then. This is not only one of my favorite songs off that album, but one of my favorite Paul Simon songs, and certainly among my all-time favorite songs, which is interesting given its relative simplicity. There’s nothing particularly quirky about the chords or harmonies, but it has a compelling tune, and tells a story in poetry that only occasionally rhymes. Even though the chorus doesn’t have real words (“Lie-la-lie…”–apparently these were supposed to be place-holder words that stuck, a fact that embarrasses Paul Simon to this day!), there’s something powerful about it.

Lyrically, “The Boxer” is somewhat autobiographical. It seems Paul Simon was receiving a lot of criticism at the time, and this was his way of dealing with it: turn it into a song. He’s misunderstood, been through a lot, and still carrying the scars. But he won’t be defeated: the fighter still remains. (My favorite mis-heard lyric: substitute “horse” for “whore” in the third verse.)

The song is in C-major and features multiple guitars layered upon one another. I’ve figured out the notes to the introduction, but I think it’s played using an alternate tuning. Since I’m not sure what that tuning might be, I’ve transcribed it in C-major, both in regular note form and in TAB-form in standard tuning:

Try out some different tunings (maybe a C tuning?) and see if you can figure out which is used on the track. If you listen carefully, you’ll notice that there aren’t a lot of other instruments on the song other than guitars. There’s a bass drum, a snare in the chorus, a bass harmonica briefly in a couple of verses, and then the mellotron (and perhaps some real strings) for the final crescendo. The majority of the song is just vocals and guitars.

Despite the fingerstyle picking, this isn’t a very complex song to play, as you can see from the lead sheet (click to enlarge):

It uses standard chords in the key of C-major (C, G, G7, G6, F, Am, Em), with the exception of the C9 at the beginning, the chord around which that introductory run is based.

If you play along to the recording, or if you happen to have perfect pitch, you’ll notice the song is not in concert pitch. It sounds to me as if the guitars on the original recording were tuned down a half-step, so although they are playing in C-major, it sounds like B-major. And then somewhere along the way, maybe during the final mix, they sped the recording up a bit, so the key on the record is somewhere between B-major and C-major. To help you out if you want to play along with the recording (a practice I highly recommend), here’s a version of the song where I’ve tweaked the pitch up to C-major:

Questions? Thoughts? Comments? Requests for future Music Monday songs…?