"The Boxer" (Simon and Garfunkel)

"The Boxer" is one of those songs that I've pretty much known since infancy.  Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970) made at least a monthly appearance in our household, and I always looked forward to this track (side 2, band 1) every time it was on the turntable.  Even though the verses were much too complex and poetic for me to grasp as a toddler, I had no problem with the easy-singalong lie-la-lie vocals in the chorus.  In fact, I remember feeling a certain ownership of the song.  It was as if by knowing that chorus, the song had become mine somehow.  I've thought about that a lot over the years: how we all take possession of others' songs and make them part of the fabric of who we are.
Paul Simon wrote "The Boxer" in 1968, almost a year and a half before Bridge Over Troubled Water was released.  Lyrically, it draws from the immigrant experience: the promise of success pitted against the harsh reality of survival, where your only real choice is to persevere or die.  Likewise, it draws from Simon's weariness with his detractors.  He and Art Garfunkel had gone from critical darlings to so-called "sellouts" and "squares" in a matter of a few short years.  The imagery of a boxer getting pummeled but not giving up the fight was a metaphor for Simon himself as an artist.
From a musical standpoint, it's also quite the composition.  And quite the recording.  It begins simply and sedately enough, with Simon fingerpicking along with guest guitarist Fred Carter, Jr.  But by the time you reach the first chorus, where the melody suddenly dips into a minor key, reflecting the self doubt and perils of the protagonist, you get a foretaste of the epic crescendo that occurs in the final chorus.
And the sound of that final chorus owes a lot to the expertise of Simon and Garfunkel's engineer/co-producer, Roy Halee.  For example, it was Halee who decided to record session drummer Hal Blaine's kit in the hallway of Columbia studios, right in front of the elevator bank, to get that huge, shotgun-like boom that erupts after each lie-la-lie.  
(In the 2011 documentary The Harmony Game, which explores the making of Bridge Over Troubled Water, Halee and Blaine tell an anecdote about an elderly security guard who'd come down to check on the commotion.  Says Blaine, "I was smashing these two drums—humongous explosion.  All in perfect synchronization as my hands were coming down, the elevator door opened. There was probably an 85-year-old security guard standing there, who thought he’d just been killed.")
There are more subtle touches on the track that Halee concocted, too.  For instance, one of my favorite moments comes after the third verse, where there's this little Bach-like instrumental interlude.  For years, I'd assumed it was a Moog synthesizer playing the majestic-sounding line.  Turns out (as Simon recounts in the aforementioned documentary), Halee paired a piccolo trumpet with a pedal steel guitar, played without the attack for a more violin-like sound, and then mixed them down to sound like a single instrument.  Stroke of genius.
Anyway, it's a song that I can never listen to just once.  I usually have to play it one time to soak in the words, another time to soak in the instrumentation, and a third time to absorb it all together.  And it really is more than just a song; it's the unbridled creativity and the ugly brutality of the American experience, set to music.