"Hung up on a Dream"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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When I was recording my 2015 version of Odessey and Oracle (which, by the way, I've switched to doing in April), I found something about "Hung up on a Dream" that I never wrote about.  This is that (very belated) post.

At the end of 2014, I listened to Simon & Garfunkel's Wednesday Morning 3 AM every Wednesday for a month and a half.  So when I was recording my own versions of the tracks from Odessey and Oracle, those songs were still fresh in my mind, and I found some lyrical similarities between "The Sound of Silence" and "Hung up on a Dream."  I think at the time, I noticed only "neon."  There's "With neon darkness shimm'ring through the haze" in "Hung up on a Dream," and in "The Sound of Silence," there's "When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light" and "And the people bowed and prayed / To the neon god they made."

Looking at it now, I found that both also mention crowds.  There's "a crowded street," "a sea of faces," and "that nameless, changing crowd" in "Hung up on a Dream," and "Ten thousand people, maybe more" in "The Sound of Silence."

There are dreams and other mental states in both too.  Obviously, there's "a dream" in the title of "Hung up on a Dream," and there's also "A sweet confusion [that] filled my mind."  "The Sound of Silence" is more enigmatic, but it seems to describe a dream in the last part of the first verse:

Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains, within the sound of silence

The second verse starts with dreams too, but they seem to be different: "In restless dreams I walked alone."

So there are certainly some similarities between the two songs, but I can't point to anything that proves that Argent even knew about Simon & Garfunkel, much less took any inspiration from them.  I think that's part of the reason it's taken me so long to write this.