Simon’s “Sound of Silence” is deafening

For as revered as it is, Red Rocks has become as much of a trampoline as a livemusic shrine, serving equally as a dance music destination and songwriter soapbox. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. We’re all animals, and should howl at the moon every chance we get.

But as a crop of rock slabs in the mountains of Colorado, Red Rocks best complements music at its most elemental — songs that consider “the way we look to a distant constellation that’s dying in a corner of the sky,” to quote “The Boy in the Bubble,” or the raw feeling of flesh on string.

Considering either, it doesn’t get more elemental than Paul Simon. At 75, the singer-songwriter not only still sounds remarkable, but is also in the company of precious few artists who haven’t stopped writing songs that fans actually want to hear. At his Wednesday night set at Red Rocks, numbers like “Dazzling Blue,” “Rewrite” and “Wristband” — all from Simon’s post2010 studio output — were legitimate sing-alongs for the sold-out crowd.

Simon left few of his songbook’s pages unturned, trotting out practically every one of his dog-eared anthems except for “Kodachrome.”

Then, there was “The Sound of Silence.” The song has become a meme in recent years, its opening line “Hello, darkness, my old friend” a succinct calling card for a sudden onset of total grief. The internet likes to set it to hamsters spacing out mid snack, a kid falling down at the jungle gym — the works.

For his au revoir, Simon took the song back. The members of his band peeled away as he played off his final songs, until it was just him and an acoustic guitar in the dark up there, as it was when he first wrote the song at the age of 21. With the rapt attention of thousands, he spoke plainly about the state of discourse in the country in measured, apolitical terms, standing up not for left, right or center, but for cooler heads, and a bird’s-eye perspective of what’s happening in America right now.

“Anger is addictive,” he said. “The brain likes it. And we are becoming a nation of addicts.”

That prelude in place, he fingerpicked and sang with the same chilling deliberation: “People talking without speaking / People hearing without listening / People writing songs that voices never share / And no one dared disturb the sound of silence.”

The crowd fell still. Though the song has been on the radio for some 50plus years, it was as if they were hearing it for the first time.