An interesting fact: Saginaw is in Michigan. "The song's entire lyrics are painted on 28 buildings in the city, including railroad tracks and bridge supports."

Composition

"America" is a song that "creates a cinematic vista that tells of the singer's search for a literal and physical America that seems to have disappeared, along with the country's beauty and ideals."[5] Art Garfunkel once described the song as "young lovers with their adventure and optimism".[6] The song has been described as a "folk song with a lilting soprano saxophone in its refrain as a small pipe organ paints acoustic guitars, framed by the ghostly traces of classic American Songbook pop structures."[7] According to EMI Music Publishing's digital sheet music for the song, "America" is composed in the key of E-flat major and set in a 6/8 time signature, and has a moderately fast groove of 172 beats per minute.[8] The duo's vocals span from the low note of B♭3 to the high note of F5.[8] Drummer Hal Blaine, keyboardist Larry Knechtel, and bassist Joe Osborn provide additional instrumentation on the track.[9] The lyrics do not follow any formal rhyme scheme.

The song opens, on Bookends, with a crossfade from "Save the Life of My Child." (This effect is not present on the single versions, which begin with a "clean" open.) The song follows two young lovers — "an apparently impromptu romantic traveling alliance" — who set out "to look for America."[10] The song makes reference to the town of Saginaw, Michigan, with the protagonist seemingly hailing from the town, but "[seeking] his fortunes elsewhere."[11] The narrator's companion Kathy is a reference to Chitty, linking the song autobiographically to the earlier Simon and Garfunkel hit "Homeward Bound," [12] and to "Kathy's Song," a love song from a previous album, Sounds of Silence.

The narrator spends four days hitchhiking from Saginaw to join Kathy in Pittsburgh, where together they board a Greyhound bus to continue the journey.[9] The narrator begins with a lighthearted and optimistic outlook ("Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together") that fades over the course of the song. To pass time, he and Kathy play games and try to guess the backgrounds of their fellow passengers. Over the course of their journey, they smoke all their cigarettes. Kathy reads a magazine before falling asleep, leaving the narrator awake to reflect on the meaning of the journey alone.[9] In the final verse, the narrator is able to speak his true emotions to Kathy, now that she is sleeping and cannot hear or answer. "I'm empty and aching and I don't know why" captures the longing and angst of the 1960s in nine simple words. The narrator then stares out the window "counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike." Many other empty, aching, and lost souls are on the highway, each on their own journey alone even if someone is traveling with them. The soaring harmony lines and crashing cymbals create a powerful and poignant end to the song's final verse: "They've all come to look for America." [10] Pete Fornatale interprets this lyric as a "metaphor to remind us all of the lost souls wandering the highways and byways of mid-sixties America, struggling to navigate the rapids of despair and hope, optimism and disillusionment."[13]

Reception

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."[14] 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."[7] 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."[15] 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."[9]

Disc jockey and author Pete Fornatale describes "America" as one of Paul Simon's "greatest writing achievements in this phase of his career."[6] 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.[2] 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."[16]

Lyrics

Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together

I've got some real estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner's pies
And we walked off to look for America
Cathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, be careful, his bowtie is really a camera
Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat
We smoked the last one an hour ago
So I looked at the scenery
She read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

Cathy, I'm lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping
And I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America