America (Simon & Garfunkel song)

Wikipedia - America (Simon & Garfunkel song)

Stephen Holden, in reviewing Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits in 1972, wrote, "'America'...was Simon's next major step forward. It is three and a half minutes of sheer brilliance, whose unforced narrative, alternating precise detail with sweeping observation evokes the panorama of restless, paved America and simultaneously illuminates a drama of shared loneliness on a bus trip with cosmic implications." Thom Jurek of Allmusic described the song's central question as an "ellipsis, a cipher, an unanswerable question," a song in which "sophisticated harmonic invention is toppled by its message." David Nichols, in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, called the song "a splendid vignette of a road trip by young lovers; both intimate and epic in scale, it traces an inner journey from naive optimism to more mature understanding." American Songwriter deemed the song "essentially a road-trip song, but like all road trips, it tends to reveal as much about the participants as it does about the lands being traversed."

Disc jockey and author Pete Fornatale describes "America" as one of Paul Simon's "greatest writing achievements in this phase of his career." In 2014, a Rolling Stone readers poll ranked it fourth among the duo's best compositions, with the magazine writing, "it captured America's sense of restlessness and confusion during the year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, as well as the escalation of the war in Vietnam," declaring it one of their most "beloved" songs. Amy S. of ClassicRockHistory defined "America," as Simon and Garfunkels best song. The author described the song America as "perhaps the most representative of Simon & Garfunkel's music: wistful and optimistic, personal and universal, and most of all, uniquely American."