Simon & Garfunkel will “debut” a “new” song on NPR’s Weekend Edition (preview below) this Saturday.
Why the quotation marks? The supposedly new song is only somewhat new. It is “Citizen of the Planet,” a song Paul wrote in 1983 for Hearts and Bones that never made the album. He performed it a couple of times, on the 1983 S&G world tour (in New Zealand, I think) and on Late Night with David Letterman (I think, redux). In 1984, he briefly discussed “Citizen” with Playboy Magazine’s Tony Schwartz:
Playboy : You’ve never written songs in the Blowin in the Wind tradition, have you?
Simon : Well, I have. There’s a song I wrote for this album and then threw out called Citizen of the Planet. It was a direct statement about nuclear disarmament. Too direct for me. It goes : “I am a citizen of the planet. I was born here. I’m going to die here. I am entitled by my birth to the treasures of the earth. No one should be denied these. No one should be denied.” I’d like to give it to some disarmament groups for others to sing, because it’s quite a good song, but it’s just not my voice.
