Towards the end of Robert Hilburn’s chunky 2018 biography of Paul Simon, the singer-songwriter says his next project will be reworking and rerecording some of his lesser-known songs.
His friend, the artist Chuck Close, dismisses the idea: “He’ll never finish that album, it won’t be challenging enough.”
However, Simon – known for stubborn doggedness, as when insisting his Broadway musical The Capeman go ahead despite being clearly doomed as an artistic and commercial failure – did finish that album, In the Blue Light.
Now retired from touring, 81-year-old Simon returns with another self-imposed challenge, this ambitious acoustic album, his first album of new material since 2016′s excellent Stranger to Stranger.
Seven Psalms runs as a single 33-minute body of work in movements of The Lord/Love Is Like a Braid/My Professional Opinion/Your Forgiveness/Trail of Volcanoes/The Sacred Harp/Wait.
Some suggest it’s a farewell statement for its intimations of mortality, the judgment to come, and contemplation of a life lived.
On the opener, he sings, “The Lord is my engineer, the Lord is the earth I ran on, the Lord is a face in the atmosphere, the path I slip and slide on”.
Love Is Like a Braid includes “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows until the real deal came. Broke me like a twig in a winter gale. Call me by my name. And in that time of prayer and waiting, where doubt and reason dwell, a jury sat deliberating.”
That “real deal” is doubtless his singer-songwriter wife of more than 30 years, Edie Brickell, who also sings and plays in places here.
On Trail of Volcanoes – which opens with him singing of having taken his guitar down to the crossroad and over the seas – he reflects, “It seems to me we’re all walking down the same road to wherever it ends. The pity is the damage that’s done leaves so little time for amends.”
Yet as melancholic – and perhaps even as solipsistic – as his words may appear, Simon also imbues these thoughts with magical realism (picking up hitchhikers in The Magic Harp with a poetic leap to the biblical David) and existential questioning, a signature of his 60-year career.
Long gone are the certainties and arrogance of youth (“‘Fools,’ said I, ‘you do not know’,” in The Sound of Silence), and now he asks, “Are we just trial and error, one of a billion in the universe?”
Coincidentally, last year on his short, spoken-word album, also titled Seven Psalms, Nick Cave – who has lost two sons in recent years – also explored, over a musical backdrop, thoughts of mortality, mercy, forgiveness and what lies beyond the pains of life.
There’s acceptance in his final piece I Come Alone and to You: “I come alone and to you, Lord, in sorrow … I have nowhere left to go but to you, Lord.”
In the emotional and musical ebb and flow of Simon’s Seven Psalms, the final song is Wait, a duet with Brickell that becomes similarly accepting: “Wait. I’m not ready, I’m just packing my gear” before “I want to believe in a dreamless transition … I need you here by my side, my beautiful mystery guide.”
The final word we hear from Simon – accompanied by Brickell – is “Amen”. Then the toll of a bell.
Seven Psalms is available now on vinyl, CD and digitally.
