The First Solo Album That Proved the Famous Harmony Could Stand Alone
For years, his voice had seemed inseparable from another one. Then the partnership ended, and the singer known for creating perfect harmony had to answer a much lonelier question: what would he sound like by himself?
On September 11, 1973, Art Garfunkel released Angel Clare, his first solo album after Simon & Garfunkel.
The title came from a character in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a novel Garfunkel had recently read. It suited a record that felt literary, careful, and more interested in atmosphere than reinvention by force.
Garfunkel had not rushed into the studio immediately after the duo’s separation. He acted in films, traveled, taught mathematics, studied music, and slowly gathered material from songwriters whose work could carry the kind of voice he possessed.
That patience is audible.
Angel Clare does not pretend Garfunkel had suddenly become Paul Simon’s replacement as a writer. Instead, it treats interpretation as an art in itself. Songs by Jimmy Webb, Van Morrison, Randy Newman, Paul Williams, and others become part of one carefully shaped emotional world.
The centerpiece was “All I Know,” written by Jimmy Webb. Its melody gives Garfunkel room to begin with intimacy before rising into the kind of high, open tone that had made “Bridge Over Troubled Water” unforgettable.
The song became his first major solo hit, reaching the American Top Ten. Its success answered the commercial question surrounding the album: listeners would follow that voice even when the familiar partner was no longer standing beside it.
But the record did not completely erase the past.
Roy Halee, who had helped engineer and produce the duo’s classic recordings, co-produced the album with Garfunkel. Larry Knechtel, the pianist whose playing anchored “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” appeared again. Paul Simon contributed guitar.
Those connections make Angel Clare more honest, not less independent. A solo beginning rarely arrives without history. Garfunkel did not need to deny the music that formed him in order to step outside the duo.
The album’s arrangements were lush and exacting. Strings, layered voices, and studio detail surrounded performances that could have become fragile if handled carelessly. At their best, the arrangements magnified the stillness rather than burying it.
That balance is clearest when the music swells beneath him. Garfunkel rarely answers by pushing harder. He lets the tone remain pure and controlled, creating intensity through height and clarity instead of grit.
Angel Clare reached number five in the United States and number fourteen in Britain. It earned a gold record only weeks after release and produced additional singles including “I Shall Sing” and “Traveling Boy.”
The numbers mattered because expectations were unforgiving. Simon & Garfunkel had ended after one of the most successful albums of their era. Any first solo statement would be measured against a partnership whose harmonies were already part of popular memory.
Garfunkel chose not to compete with that memory by becoming louder or more fashionable. He trusted the element listeners had always recognized: a voice that could make a carefully chosen song feel both elevated and vulnerable.
The result also defended a kind of musicianship that is easy to undervalue. Choosing the right composition, finding its emotional temperature, and shaping a performance around it can be as decisive as writing the song in the first place.
On the anniversary of the album’s release, Angel Clare sounds less like a dramatic escape from a famous duo than a quiet act of self-definition.
The harmony had ended. The singer remained—and for the first time, an entire album asked us to hear exactly what he could do alone.
Listen to the recording
The R&B Oldie That Had to Be Rebuilt Before It Could Reach No. 1
Linda Ronstadt had already been singing "You're No Good" onstage when she entered the studio to make Heart Like a Wheel. The question was not whether the song worked. It was whether a 1960s R&B number with several previous recordings could become unmistakably hers.
The answer came from Andrew Gold, a gifted multi-instrumentalist whose painstaking arrangement turned the song into something darker and more imposing. Released as a single in late 1974, Ronstadt's recording reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1975. It remains her only solo No. 1 on that chart.
An old song needing a new identity
Written by Clint Ballard Jr., "You're No Good" was first recorded by Dee Dee Warwick in 1963. Betty Everett soon cut the best-known early American version, taking it to No. 51 on the Hot 100 in 1964. The Swinging Blue Jeans also scored with the song in Britain.
Those performances treated the composition as taut, rhythm-driven soul and pop. Ronstadt, who added it to her live repertoire in the early 1970s, understood its sturdy construction: a blunt confession, a memorable refrain, and a narrator who admits to causing pain before declaring herself finished with another damaging relationship.
A straightforward revival, however, would have left Ronstadt competing with the song's history. Producer Peter Asher and Gold instead used the studio to reconsider its emotional temperature.
Building the darkness layer by layer
Gold, who would later have solo hits including "Lonely Boy" and write "Thank You for Being a Friend," became a crucial architect of the Heart Like a Wheel sound. On "You're No Good," he played multiple instruments and constructed a dense arrangement through overdubbing, with Kenny Edwards supplying the anchoring bass.
The recording begins with restraint, leaving Ronstadt room to establish the narrator's uneasy mixture of relief, guilt, and defiance. Then the track tightens around her. Electric guitars answer one another, keyboards deepen the shadows, and the rhythm grows heavier without becoming cluttered. By the instrumental passage and extended ending, the song has moved far from a compact R&B cover. It feels closer to a reckoning.
That transformation also changes the meaning of Ronstadt's performance. She does not present the narrator as simply triumphant. Her clear, controlled delivery allows regret to remain audible beneath the accusation. When her voice rises, it sounds less like casual dismissal than a hard-won attempt to break free.
The hit that changed her scale
"You’re No Good" became the lead single from Heart Like a Wheel, the album that pushed Ronstadt from respected singer to major American star. The single's ascent to No. 1 demonstrated how naturally her voice could move among country, pop, R&B, and rock without losing its identity.
Yet the record's success was not produced by vocal power alone. Its impact depends on the tension between Ronstadt's directness and Gold's layered, increasingly ominous setting. She sounds emotionally exposed; the arrangement sounds as if it is closing in.
That is why the recording still rewards another listen. Beneath its polished surface is a creative risk: instead of respectfully reproducing a familiar old song, Ronstadt, Gold, and Asher pulled it apart and found the unease inside it. What emerged was not merely a successful cover, but the one solo single that carried Linda Ronstadt all the way to the top of the Hot 100.
She Wrote a Song to Say Goodbye - The World Heard a Promise of Forever
The voice sounds almost too gentle to be delivering a final decision. There is affection in it, and gratitude, and the unmistakable ache of leaving someone behind. But beneath that tenderness is a boundary. Dolly Parton was not asking for permission to keep dreaming. She was finding a way to move forward without pretending the person she was leaving had meant nothing. In 1974, that difficult goodbye reached listeners as "I Will Always Love You."
For anyone who knows the song mainly through Whitney Houston, its beginning can come as a surprise. Parton did not write it as a declaration to a romantic partner. Its inspiration was her professional separation from Porter Wagoner, the country star whose television show had helped introduce her to a much larger audience. The song preserved her appreciation for him while announcing that their working relationship needed to change.
Parton joined The Porter Wagoner Show in 1967. Television gave viewers repeated chances to hear her distinctive voice, and the pair built a successful recording partnership. Yet she was also making solo records and developing a reputation as a songwriter. These were not competing versions of her talent; they were parts of the same ambition. By the early 1970s, the woman standing beside Wagoner had ideas that could not all fit inside his program.
Leaving was complicated precisely because the partnership had mattered. Gratitude can make a necessary decision feel like betrayal, especially when someone has opened a door for you. In later accounts, Parton described struggling to explain her wish to go. She recalled playing the new song for Wagoner and seeing him moved to tears. Music had communicated the affection behind a decision that ordinary conversation had made difficult to hear.
The recording appeared on her Jolene album, released in February 1974, and became a number-one country single. Its achievement was not simply that Parton had turned a private difficulty into a hit. She had written a farewell that left room for both people. The departing voice does not dismiss the past, list offenses or demand that the other person admit defeat. It wishes the listener well while accepting that staying is no longer the answer. There is no triumphant announcement that she will be better off. Instead, the listener hears someone trying to protect a shared history from the hurt of the present. That restraint makes the decision feel more consequential.
That distinction becomes clearer when you listen to the original. Parton does not begin at full emotional volume. Her delivery is light, close and carefully measured, allowing the melody to carry what the speaker seems reluctant to burden the other person with. When the refrain arrives, the voice opens up without losing its delicacy. The contrast makes the feeling seem to escape despite her composure, rather than being performed for applause.
It is also worth noticing what the song leaves out. There is no television studio, recording contract or named colleague inside the lyric. Those details explain why Parton wrote it, but their absence explains why strangers could make it their own. Someone leaving a relationship, a familiar home or a chapter of life could recognize the same uncomfortable truth: wanting to go does not require you to stop caring.
The real separation was less tidy than a three-minute song. Parton left Wagoner's show in 1974, but their professional connections continued afterward, including his involvement in her records through 1976. That matters because the ballad should not be mistaken for a magical solution to every disagreement. It expressed a generous intention. The business of building an independent career still had to happen beyond the final note.
The song then lived several lives. Parton recorded it again for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and that version reached number one on the country chart in 1982. A decade later, Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard. Her rendition spent fourteen weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. A farewell rooted in one country music partnership had become the centerpiece of an international pop phenomenon.
Houston's performance and Parton's original invite different kinds of listening. Houston brings breathtaking scale, turning the refrain into a moment of release. Parton keeps the listener nearer to the person trying to say the words. Neither approach erases the other. Together, they reveal the strength of a composition that can support a towering vocal statement without losing the intimate conversation at its center.
Return to Parton's recording with its original purpose in mind. The tenderness no longer sounds like a request to stay together at any cost. It becomes the sound of someone holding onto affection while choosing a different future. That is the quiet surprise inside this enduring ballad: the promise lasts, but the person still leaves. Listen below, and hear how firmly Dolly Parton says goodbye without making her voice turn cold.
