Homeward Bound
Belief and beauty explored with rare grace. By Nick Dalton
Paul Simon Seven Psalms ★★★★★
Owl Records 19658779112 (CD, LP)
Making its entrance with a softly tolling bell followed by some of the most delicate acoustic guitar since the early days of Simon & Garfunkel, this is a gentle, mystical record, a world away from the boisterousness of Paul Simon’s Graceland years.
Given the title, is it a finding of religion late in life – Simon is 83 in October – or something broader? The latter, almost certainly, as Simon takes control of religious-sounding words and phrases, things we think we know and understand, and turns them from conventional thinking into something more ephemeral, more environmentally and spiritually inflected.
Seven Psalms is not so much an album of songs as a 33-minute work, a suite, divided into seven parts – ‘movements’ – all accompanied by little more than beautifully worked guitar, mostly played by Simon, echoing through at various times what might be a distant gong, or the sound of falling water, the tinkling of chimes. In there somewhere are touches of violin, flute, cello, even the murmur of British vocal ensemble VOCES8, but you’d be hardpressed to pin anything down, and it never gets in the way of Simon’s guitar.
It’s all acoustic but in a near-classical fashion rather than easy-going folk music. There’s something almost biblical, too, in both Simon’s delivery, his characteristically frail, soaring vocals sounding as if he’s gazing into the distance from a pulpit, yet there’s also a folk feel, something more medieval than mid-20th century. That also leads to a fantasy edge, a touch of wizardry as Simon weaves his gentle magic. And yet it’s also very much up to date.
It’s the opener, The Lord, that sets the tone, far from what one might imagine from the title. Any preconceptions are swiftly put to bed with lines such as, “The Lord is the earth I ride on/the Lord is the face in the atmosphere” amid a string of references to forest and ocean, starlit nights and tribal voices.
The verse – “The Covid virus is the Lord/the Lord is the ocean rising/the Lord is a terrible swift sword/a simple truth, surviving” – sets things off in another direction, although exactly what the destination is, is hard to fathom.
Seven Psalms, however, is anything but preaching, a deft folk opera with delicious tunes. My Professional Opinion is a standout: gentle, fingerpicked, string-sliding blues, dotted with snatches of growling harmonica, a lovely, playful tune and lyrics (“I heard two cows in a conversation/one called the other one a name”) up there with Simon’s best. It has all the makings of a hit record.
By the end of the song, it’s drifted into a reprise of The Lord, one of two that bring the work together.
The Sacred Harp is another pop-tinged gem, seemingly a mystery of two hitchhikers escaping the outside world. It’s notable as being the first time Simon has sung on record with Edie Brickell, his angelic-voiced wife of three decades, who gives this quietly epic tale a particularly haunting edge.
Brickell is also on the beautiful, tear-jerking finale, Wait, a seeming end-of-days elegy (“I’m not ready/i’m just packing my gear”), which sounds scarily personal, as if he recognises he’s homeward bound. A choir comes and goes and the stringed accompaniment provides an enigmatic backdrop that at one point sounds like the gathering of darkening clouds. Then there’s the distant peal of church bells leading to Simon and Brickell’s harmonising on the final word: “Amen.”
The album is full of the uplifting delicacy of the sort that has filled Simon’s work over the years on the likes of Bridge Over Troubled Water. There is also the extraordinary feel of the near stream-ofconsciousness lyrics: the perhaps forlorn hope of redemption in Your Forgiveness, and the tragedy of refugees – in the modern world and on a more metaphysical level – in Trail Of Volcanoes, with its faint hint of North African musicality.
This is not only Simon’s first album in almost five years (the last was 2018’s In The Blue Light, his re-recording of a number of his own less-wellknown songs), it’s also his first new material since Stranger To Stranger, a No 1 album in the UK back in 2016. Considering that, in 2018, Simon announced he was retiring from live performances, suggesting he was in the process of winding down, Seven Psalms is an especially impressive piece of work. It was recorded everywhere from Austin – not too far from his Texas Hill Country home – to Los Angeles and London. Simon co-produced with Kyle Crusham, from hip, arty Austin pop-rockers The Real Heroes, and seems to have been intensely involved in every note.
The making of the album is detailed in a coming film, In Restless Dreams, by award-winning documentary maker Alex Gibney. In one segment Simon is seen strolling about, monitoring and directing every sound, every utterance of the singers. “This is a journey,” he says. “This whole piece is really an argument I’m having with myself about belief or not.”
Simon ascribes the birth of Seven Psalms to a mystical experience, a dream in 2019 that he was working on an album of that name.
“The dream was so strong that I got up and I wrote it,” he explains. “But I had no idea what that meant. Gradually information would come. I would start to wake up two or three times a week between 3:30 and five in the morning, and words would come. I’d write them down, then start to put it together.”
The result is this, a thing of beauty, with
Simon sounding as if he’s discovered a new way of thinking, a new meaning to life. Whether it’s a new religion is open to interpretation but it seems more an opening of the eyes to the possibilities of the world. As Simon, winding back the years and sounding like a 20-year-old, sings exquisitely: “The Lord is my record producer.”
“It’s a thing of beauty”