If someone says they’re on a farewell tour, then does another tour a few years later, we tend to assume it was all a scam to make money. But it’s worth considering that with some musicians, there may be a genuine effort to call it a day – before their psyches suffer with the reality of what that means. “I never said I was going to retire. I said I was going to stop,” Paul Simon said a while back, with a distinct distinction, perhaps, just for him. For any serious musician, the onset of old age and all that compromises the ears and hand movements must be a living death. Fortunately, Simon has been playing in the underworld between this world and the other world for some time. His latest record, the 33 minute song cycle Seven Psalms (2023) was written in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, its spiritual concept and lyrics delivered in a series of 3am dreams.
Simon once described prayer as “remembering God” (“The Cool, Cool River,” 1990). IN Seven PsalmsGod is “a smoke… my personal joke”: he is a forest ranger, an engineer – and Covid-19. Simon has written about his philosophical struggles with faith and given entertaining dialogues with an imaginary creator—but God appears more poetically, in his lyrics, as something semi-visible and elemental: a “face in the atmosphere,” angels in architecture, a spirit hovering over the Statue of Liberty. His songs are like books of emblems—a steady stream of vivid images, each of which feels like a little collision with the divine. That these moments are shrugged off by him, casually, in the speech of a New Yorker, only intensifies the sense that God may be here on earth, in the music itself. “I lived a life of pleasant sorrow until the real deal came/ Broke me like a branch in a winter storm./ Called my name.”
During registration Seven PsalmsSimon became deaf in one ear. He went into a deep depression (like grief, this included a phase of “denial”), then recovered and spent several months trying to keep playing and going on tour. A Quiet Celebration, despite its title, is not a stripped down version of his hits sung in his (admittedly) now very quiet voice. It’s not “back to basics” like older musicians have been doing for years now, often with a blues repertoire and a piece of perspex wrapped around the drum kit.
Rather, it is a wholesale reimagining of his material designed to accommodate his altered frequencies. Only a music director – which I am not – can explain exactly what this very clever show is doing, but if you’ve ever seen a Paul Simon show, you’ll know that there are generally a lot of musicians on stage and that percussion is a big part of it. At the Royal Albert Hall, the musicians are still there – about 12 of them – and the percussion is still, somehow, the star of the show: there must be 50 drums and shakers of various shapes and sizes, and three men playing them. But there is very little use of the cymbal (he plays havoc by ear) and the snares are brushed rather than struck with a stick. Most memorably, just as Simon brought the accordion into the limelight in the mid-1980s, when few others were using it in music, he has found a new instrument to love: the “cloud chamber bowl”, large perspex vessels of various sizes suspended from a wooden frame, tickled and teased by hammers that sound like a high-pitched smoke bell. The other musicians on stage – guitar, cello, flute – are playing (yes, very quietly) but in a way that’s not at all muted or muffled: they’re just applying great content.
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The whole effect is of something powerful but thunderous, like the sound of heat-lightning a few miles away. It suits him Seven Psalmswhich includes the entire first set and is played immediately without applause (Simon basically warns the audience not to clap). He’s gray from head to toe – gray jacket, gray hair – but gray in a gentlemanly way, like a late-period Leonard Cohen. I’ve seen a lot of ‘oldies’ at the Royal Albert Hall recently, on tours you suspect might be their last, but I can’t think of any other figure who could make their latest and most avant-garde album the centerpiece of a tour like this. I also wonder if, with this musical restructuring, Simon has initiated a new approach to aging rockers that will buy them another decade and enable them to tour until they die. Gone are the days when you heard things like, “I’m going to do this until I can’t run on stage anymore.” Simon, by warning everyone that this tour will be quiet, has created an expectation of diminished circumstances which he then proceeds to erase.
He plays two new, muted versions of songs from Gracelandwhich was the first record to bridge the musical generation gap between parents and children (it has never grown again). A device for kids in the 80s listening to in their family cars, GracelandThe images of his caricatures – “short attention spans”, “girls with bare faces” – was the first taste of evil regimes and dark political forces that lay beyond anyone’s understanding at the time, at least for me.
i loved Rhythm of the Saints even more so, five years later, where the ethnomusicological aspect was transplanted from South Africa to South America, with a battalion of drummers enlisted in the streets of Salvador. The album vibrates with the humid heat of the Amazon, the cover of a forest floor. Two songs from it – “Spirit Voices” and “The Cool, Cool River” – were more effective on stage than Graceland songs, maybe because of all the hits at work after Simon, which somehow did not beat the words: “I believe in the future, I will live in my car, my radio tuned to the voice of a star.”
Simon’s wife, singer Edie Bricknell, has joined him for harmony on this tour and it seems she’s looking after him too. She ran on stage whistling her solo of Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard – before running off again.
And there were a number of Simon’s more impressionistic (should that be surreal?) songs, including 1983’s “Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War” (title taken from a photo caption) and “The Late Great Johnny Ace” from the same year, inspired by his 50s blues crooner, who played again on Christmas Day. His image is beamed along with two other Johnnies who died of gunshot wounds, JFK and Lennon, in a meditation in 1964. Simon was living in Swinging London then and loved it. It’s almost hard to imagine him being thrilled by The Rolling Stones (which he was), when he ended up turning to such different musical forms that you couldn’t really call him a pop star, or a rock star.
Maybe that explains why Seven Psalms felt like the heart of this last (last?) tour – with all the newness, weirdness and… shhh.
(Further reading: Olivia Dean’s definition of love)
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