[Bridge Over Troubled Water] is a model of consistency and professionalism. The title song, opening the album, is both sad and mighty, disturbing and comforting in one tonal exercise…. As the shape of the album begins to take form, it becomes a song for children, for the child in all of us. It ceases to be music bound by generational conceit and loses nothing in the process.

"Keep the Customer Satisfied" is one of those Paul Simon novelettes that eludes and delights with bits and pieces of image, feeling, character, and sequence. Sad, lonely, and unaccepting, "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" closes the side on a note of reflection….

It's a retrospective, almost amusing view of the artists as song stylists, growing, changing, marking off the passage of time in tune. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel are the architects of songs, building rather than blurting, shaping, defining, and...