Paul Simon Dedicates Lockdown Performance To New York City

Moving Acoustic Number

Paul Simon has been churning out at-home performance videos and uploading them on YouTube amid the COVID-19 pandemic. For the clip below, he takes on the Simon & Garfunkel classic hit from their 1970 studio LP “Bridge over Troubled Water.” He dedicates his solo acoustic rendition to his hometown, New York City.

Before launching into the song, he said: “Hello my friends, I’m sending my love and concern and I dedicate this song to my fellow New Yorkers.”

“The Boxer” took over a hundred hours to record and was released as a single on March 21, 1969. And Simon & Garfunkel had to perform it at multiple locations including Nashville’s Columbia Studios and St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City.

Simon told Playboy in a 1984 interview, “I think the song was about me: everybody’s beating me up, and I’m telling you now I’m going to go away if you don’t stop. By that time we had encountered our first criticism. For the first few years, it was just pure praise. It took two or three years for people to realize that we weren’t strange creatures that emerged from England but just two guys from Queens who used to sing rock’n’roll. And maybe we weren’t real folkies at all! Maybe we weren’t even hippies!”

Check out the performance below.