Bookends

A duo best known for pretty harmonies built a song cycle about time running out, from a child's cry to two old men on a park bench watching the light go.

"Voices of Old People" makes the argument literal: Garfunkel taped residents of nursing homes, and their fragmentary, half-lost sentences sit right there in the running order, no melody to soften them. That editing decision is the risk of the whole first side, which tracks a life forward until "Old Friends" leaves two men on a bench, afraid, and the strings swell into the returning "Bookends Theme." Even "America," a bus ride full of young hope, reads differently framed this way, its wonder shadowed by everything the album says comes after. The back half loosens into singles, but it's that first side's nerve — pop music willing to record actual old age and let it stammer — that keeps the record honest.