St Paul's Chapel, Columbia University — The Boxer vocal recording

The vocal sections of 'The Boxer' — Simon and Garfunkel's 1969 single, considered by many to be the finest song of their career — were recorded in the resonant nave of St Paul's Chapel on Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus. The chapel, built between 1903 and 1907, has an acoustical quality produced by its domed ceiling and stone construction that creates a natural reverberation impossible to achieve electronically. Producer Roy Halee brought Simon and Garfunkel to the chapel specifically for Garfunkel's vocal parts, which required a space that would make the voice sound simultaneously intimate and cathedral-vast.

The recording of 'The Boxer' was a multisite operation of the kind that the technical ambitions of late-1960s pop production had made possible. While the vocals were captured in the Columbia chapel, the drums were recorded in the stairwell of a nearby building with the elevator shaft exposed — the specific acoustic of that improvised space producing the crack of the snare drum that opens each verse. The song's famous lie-la-lie chorus, which Garfunkel's vocal turns into something devotional rather than deflective, was recorded in the chapel's reverberation. The combination of these different rooms, assembled on tape, produces the song's distinctive spatial quality.

St Paul's Chapel is an active Episcopal chapel on the Columbia University campus, open to university community members and visitors. The campus at Morningside Heights — overlooking Harlem, adjacent to the Cathedral of St John the Divine — is one of New York's more dramatically situated institutional environments. The chapel is a working religious space and performance venue as well as a recording location of historical significance; the fact that one of the most celebrated vocal performances in American popular music was captured in its nave is unmarked by any signage.