Why Don't You Write Me

Album: Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song found Paul Simon experimenting with reggae for the first time. When the American songwriter lived in Britain in the 1960s, it was during the height a genre of Jamaican music known as ska, that was popular with mods at the time. Simon tried to record this song as Ska, but he told Mojo magazine July 2012, that he "was in Los Angeles with American musicians, and it didn't sound right." A few years later, Simon recorded "Mother and Child Reunion," one of the earliest songs by a white musician to feature prominent elements of reggae.

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