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The summer tour is the latest phase of a successful reunion that began with the 1981 Concert in Central Park. The next step is a new album, titled Think Too Much, Simon and Garfunkel’s first full-length studio collaboration since 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water.

The first half of the Vancouver concert has gone smoothly, packed with hits from “Cecilia” to “El Condor Pasa,” with a couple of new tunes and respective solo offerings thrown in; but things hit a slight bump in the road as the duo launch into the title track from the Think Too Much album: both miss their entrance and neglect to sing the first line of the song. Then one tries to sing the first line as the other attempts to catch up by singing the second. They are back together in time for the voices to blend on “The fact is you don’t think as much as you could,” which Simon follows with a spoken “huh…yeah.”

Twenty-six years ago, that simple “huh…yeah,” sounded like nothing more than a jokey acknowledgement of an onstage screw-up. Today, listening back to a bootleg recording of the Vancouver concert, the aside sounds loaded, perhaps rueful. Maybe that’s just a hindsight-tainted temptation to read too much into it, but the fact is that, on that summer night, Paul Simon had a lot on his mind. One thing weighing on him was the fate of the new Simon and Garfunkel album. Publicly, the Think Too Much LP was expected out following the tour; privately, it was dead in the water, and Simon and Garfunkel’s partnership, which had been on-again and off-again for almost three decades, was about to enter another “off-again” phase.

As 1982 turned into 1983, the reunion sparked by the Central Park show had looked less and less like a one-off thing and more like an ongoing partnership. The surest sign of this direction was the revelation that there was a new album in the works: Think Too Much, a studio collection of new material, Simon-penned songs to feature the classic Simon/Garfunkel vocal blend.

In some respects, the project was doomed from the start. The songs intended for the Think Too Much album hadn’t been written with Simon and Garfunkel in mind – they were written for Simon’s next solo LP, a follow-up to the unjustly overlooked One-Trick Pony. Immediately after the Central Park concert, Simon had started recording his new solo album. 

With Lenny Waronker co-producing, Simon recorded several of his news songs, including “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” “Song About the Moon” and “Allergies.”  Waronker left the project in 1982 after becoming president of Warner Bros.

In the meantime, the success of the Central Park concert brought demand for further reunion shows, and Simon and Garfunkel obliged, touring Japan and Europe in 1982. The success of the reunion, combined with pressure from Warner Bros, caused Simon to consider the idea of a new Simon and Garfunkel studio album. In interviews in the spring of 1982 Simon and Garfunkel were suggesting that a reunion album was a possibility. Simon was by this point roughly halfway through recording his solo album, so the logical route was to simply bring Garfunkel in and turn it into a Simon and Garfunkel album.

The reunion album project was fraught with tension from the beginning. One source of unease for Simon was the fact that this particular set of songs was very personal to him. 

“These new songs are too much about my life - about Carrie [Fisher] - to have anybody else sing them,” he told Playboy in 1984. Garfunkel countered that he understood the emotions behind the songs and that, as a singer, he could interpret them. Simon agreed to give it a try, on the condition that he would produce the album alone. On the duo’s earlier efforts, Simon shared production duties with Garfunkel and Roy Halee. Halee did reunite with Simon and Garfunkel to work on the new album, eventually credited as the album’s co-producer and chief engineer.

Simon’s demand for production autonomy frustrated Garfunkel, but he reluctantly agreed and then began the task of devising his own vocal parts for Simon’s new songs. This included some solo vocal parts – such as the bridges of “Cars Are Cars” and “Song About the Moon” – as well as the trademark harmonies. However, Simon’s new melodies didn’t lend themselves as readily to Garfunkel’s harmonies as their ‘60s counterparts had done.