Two years ago, Paul Simon released his 15th album. And the public greeted it as one might expect the 15th album by a singer-songwriter in his 80s to be received. Reviews were respectful. Interviews dutifully noted Simon’s iconic status. A two-part career retrospective documentary directed by Alex Gibney was concurrently released on a prominent streaming platform. And, after that, the album gently drifted to that place where all pop culture artifacts go after their brief window of exposure has closed.
There was a time when a new Paul Simon record was a major event guaranteed to gin up commercial and critical excitement. It’s fair to say that time composed much of the last half of the 20th century, and even a decade or so of the early 21st. But in 2018, Simon excused himself from the world’s stage, via a well-publicized farewell tour. Then something strange and unexpected happened. Just four months after his “final” concert, he was awakened from a strange dream that instructed him to start a new project called Seven Psalms. Over the proceeding weeks, there were more dreams that conjured lyrics. In time, the most formally atypical record of Paul Simon’s life took shape — a single 33-minute piece of music, divided into seven movements, that weighed the pros and cons of faith, life, and the end of life.
As much as any of his ’60s-originated peers, Simon is responsible for the kinds of songs (“The Sound Of Silence,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Mrs. Robinson,” etc.) so entrenched in the collective cultural memory that even non-fans know them by heart. But Seven Psalms is not a “songs” record in the traditional sense. Simon lets these melodies drift rather than refining and perfecting them, as is his custom, seemingly directing his beautiful, questing guitar licks at the heavens. The first movement, titled “The Lord,” becomes a recurring motif, with Simon returning to a folk-baroque riff and a lyrical structure in which he describes the almighty in terms that are wondrous (“The Lord is my engineer”), mysterious (“The Lord is a puff smoke”), and confounding (“The Lord is my personal joke”). By the last movement, “Wait,” he’s arrived at a similarly conflicted destination, expressing both fear and acceptance over an unavoidable fate in the form of a conversation between a man at death’s door and an angel assuring him of heaven’s comforts. (“It’s just like home,” she says.)
Comparisons to other “mortality” records by artists of Simon’s generation, namely David Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, were obvious and inevitable upon the release of Seven Psalms. But Simon’s record differs in two important ways. First, other than significant hearing loss in his left ear, Simon insists he is in good health. “That character in ‘Wait’ could be me. It’s not far from me. But am I actually thinking that on a daily basis? No, I’m not,” he told Mojo in 2023, adding of Seven Psalms, “I don’t think this is my final piece.”
Unlike Bowie and Cohen, thankfully, Simon did not die immediately after the release of his mortality record. Which brings up the other important distinction for Seven Psalms: He’s back on tour for the first time in seven years, and introducing his latest songs to audiences that have come to hear “Cecilia” and “You Can Call Me Al.” Dubbed A Quiet Celebration, a concession to Simon’s hearing problems, the show opens with the entirety of Seven Psalms before a set that mixes lesser-known gems from his back catalog with a small selection of the “everybody knows them by heart” songs. (No “Cecilia” and “You Can Call Me Al” this time, though.)
An artist of Simon’s stature “lying” about the veracity of a farewell tour used to be fodder for indignant music critics and hacky stand-up comedians. But, personally speaking, it’s hard to feign outrage over a man of Simon’s advanced age continuing to ply his craft on stage, especially given the nature of these shows (worthwhile new material in mid-sized theaters rather than familiar greatest hits in arenas) and the fact that all of us eventually are permanently retired by the usual life-and-death circumstances. Simon might have (briefly) quit touring, but he never stopped being creative. And for that we should be grateful.
On Easter Sunday, I caught the first of three shows scheduled this week in Minneapolis. I was extra-eager to see Simon given my ever-growing love and respect for his work as I have followed my own mortality journey into middle age. Back in my teens and early 20s, I viewed Paul Simon as a purveyor of sleepy soft rock with occasional problematic overtones. But now I regard him as one of my very favorite boomer-era songwriters, whose light musical touch and conversational lyrical style often belies heavy subject matter and genuine philosophical insight.
This personal shift began with 2011’s So Beautiful Or So What, a warm and witty song cycle that addresses many of the same themes as Seven Psalms but with a slyer sense of humor. (Like “The Afterlife,” which imagines going to heaven like a trip to the DMV.) From there, I dug deeper into the less celebrated corners of his work and found that I especially adored two so-called flops released between two of his most successful records — 1975’s Still Crazy After All These Years, which won the Album Of The Year Grammy, and 1986’s Graceland, still his most popular LP.
The first flop was One-Trick Pony, a film that Simon starred in, wrote, and soundtracked with 10 original songs. Simon plays Jonah Levin, an over-the-hill folk-rocker who had a hit in the ’60s but now is stuck playing low-paying club gigs in the middle of nowhere. As an actor, Simon falters when playing stock “domestic strife” scenes with his estranged wife and co-parent (Blair Brown), the proverbial woman who gets left behind while he hacks out in the hinterlands. But when the film focuses on Simon and his band (played by Simon’s actual band at the time, including drummer Steve Gadd, bassist Tony Levin, guitarist Eric Gale, and keyboardist Richard Tee), it naturalistically depicts the rhythms of tour life, in which a series of minor triumphs intermittently break up the prevailing dreariness of performing concerts everyone can see aren’t going very well.
The result is one of the most authentic movies about musicians I’ve ever seen. That verisimilitude is doubly impressive given that Simon — a celebrity pop star since his mid-20s — had been the opposite of a struggling musician for a good 15 years at that point. But he nevertheless was uniquely attuned to the drudgery of being a past-your-prime has-been. In one particularly painful sequence, Levin is invited to appear on a ’60s nostalgia TV special alongside actual stars of the period like The Lovin’ Spoonful. And he performs his hit, a drippy “topical” folk-rock ditty called “Soft Parachutes,” which actually is a brilliant Simon & Garfunkel parody written by Simon. But this ultimately proves to be a moment of professional disappointment and embarrassment.
One-Trick Pony came out in the fall of 1980, but the tone is pure ’70s New Hollywood, with its deep cynicism about the music business (look for Lou Reed — yes, that Lou Reed — as a meddling record producer), episodic storytelling, and downbeat ending. Which likely explains the film’s failure at the box office. (Heaven’s Gate opened catastrophically the following month, signaling the end of Hollywood’s last golden age.)
It says something about Simon’s commercial reputation that the soundtrack produced a top-10 hit, “Late In The Evening,” and still was regarded as an underperforming bomb. Simon responded by reuniting with his old partner, Art Garfunkel, an unexpected echo of his desperate One-Trick Pony character, albeit on a much grander scale. But his next record, 1983’s Hearts And Bones, was even truer to One-Trick Pony‘s vibe of “aging sad guy in a rapidly changing world” disillusionment. Balancing of-the-moment new-wave pastiches (which have aged better than expected) with bitter divorced-guy ruminations (he had recently split from his second wife, Carrie Fisher), it’s as real and gut-wrenching an expression of midlife ennui as any album put out by a member of his peer group in that era. Given that Graceland was still an unforeseen comeback on the distant horizon, Simon at the time must have seemed, like Jonah Levin, to be playing out the string of a fading career.
Only in Simon’s case, he also happened to be writing some of his finest songs. A personal favorite is “Train In The Distance,” which evinces Simon’s talent for encapsulating entire lifetimes in the space of a few, impeccably worded verses. In the song, a couple meets, they fall in love, they fall out of love, and then they try to come to terms with what it all means. At the song’s conclusion, Simon sings ruefully:
“What is the point of this story
What information pertains
The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly
Into our hearts and our brains.”
As Sunday’s concert commenced, and Simon guided his (large but quiet) band into the Seven Psalms material after informing the audience that they would have to wait for songs they knew for about 35 minutes, my mind flashed on how much I’ve listened to One-Trick Pony and Hearts And Bones in recent months. And I also thought about Simon’s most famous peer, Bob Dylan (who I also have seen perform recently), and about how both men have avoided ending up like Jonah Levin.
Since 2021, Dylan has been on a tour centered on his most recent album, 2020’s Rough And Rowdy Ways. This insistence on pushing new material on historically complacent classic-rock audiences sets Dylan and Simon apart from most of their contemporaries. (As does, it should be noted, the quality of their “late” career material.) In a live setting, Seven Psalms was heavier on mood than grabby hooks, creating a feeling of dreamy contemplation somewhat antithetical to the boozy rowdiness of some in the audience. Simon pressed on admirably, regardless.
And then there’s the matter of his voice, which has aged considerably even since the 2018 farewell tour. For most of his career, Simon retained the boyish sunniness that’s defined his vocals since the mid-1960s. But now, his voice is raspy and quivers noticeably. You can’t help but hear the strain when he reaches for high notes. Dylan has had the benefit of his voice evolving (or deteriorating, if you’re less of a fan than I am) over the span of decades. With Simon, however, the change was more sudden. And yet, like Dylan, he has compensated for this by writing songs that suit him as he sounds now. Seven Psalms plays like a private confrontation with God at 3 a.m., and when Simon sings lines like “I have my reasons to doubt / A white light eases the pain / Two billion heartbeats and out / Or does it all begin again?” (from “Your Forgiveness”), the cracks in his voice make the lyrics all the more affecting.
But how would that old-man voice affect the old songs? During the intermission, my wife and I wondered whether this Simon could pull off the youthful exuberance of “Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard” or any of the Simon & Garfunkel material. But as the second set unfolded, it became clear that Simon had chosen songs that aligned with the mood and themes of Seven Psalms. It’s possible that I was projecting after being put into a certain headspace by that spellbinding opening act. But Simon appeared to be using Seven Psalms to illuminate meanings, both stated and hidden, in his older work. In that context, “Graceland” was renewed as a plea for redemption, with the hope that eventually “we all will be received” at some glorious, mystical place sustained by belief and imagination. “Slip Slidin’ Away” reverted from feel-good sing-along back to an existential meditation about how people “believe we’re gliding down the highway / when in fact we’re slip slidin’ away.” One of the oldest tunes in the set, “Homeward Bound,” rhymed with both those aforementioned songs as a yearning anthem about returning to “home where my love lies waiting / silently for me.” Even the configuration of Simon’s band extended these concepts of reunion and reconciliation — there was Steve Gadd back behind the kit, playing the legendary drum pattern he created for “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover,” along with a cameo by bassist Bakithi Kumalo, the sole surviving member of the Graceland band.
Amid the hits were several numbers most of the audience didn’t seem to recognize, including a shocking amount of songs from my beloved Hearts And Bones. There were three in all, including “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” an overt song about loss tying together tributes to the titular R&B singer, John F. Kennedy and John Lennon; and “Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War,” another dazzling pocket-narrative about the surrealist painter and his spouse dancing to the doo-wop groups that Simon loved as a child. Groups that are all now long since departed.
There was also “Train In The Distance,” which fit perfectly. What I love about that song is the duality of the central image. A train in the distance can induce dread, or it may provide comfort. It all depends on where you are in relation to the train. But no matter where you are, that train is coming. And it could be closer than you think. So you might as well make all the noise — quietly, if necessary — that you can in the meantime.