Paul Simon
Seven Psalms
OWL/LEGACY
Paul Simon is 81 years old and still on a wandering musical odyssey that sees him slipping and sliding over genres and musical forms. It’s good to hear his voice again, and he’s still surprising listeners, but not all the surprises work in his favor for Seven Psalms. The nocturnal characteristics of his new 33-minute acoustic tone poem are another fork in the path for the songwriter. The new album’s title and many of its lyrics were birthed from dreams and the Biblical book of Psalms. Just like a dream recited in the waking hours, it sometimes doesn’t make a ton of sense upon first listen before its more subtle musical qualities are revealed after further introspection in quiet places. That’s hard to do in 2023.
Seven Psalms doesn’t really sound like anything Simon’s produced over the past six decades of his illustrious music career, and that gives it at least some unique shine and sense of place within his discography. He seems to have that creative spark again, even though these tracks are more like quiet and crackling campfire embers versus a raging inferno of songcraft. Flutes, harmonica, singing bowls, and swelling strings propel many of these serpentine psalms while acoustic guitar leads them along like a shepherd. “Tears and flowers / Dry over time / Memory leaves us / Melody and rhyme / When the cold wind blows,” Simon sings on the opening track, “The Lord,” whose central theme of man desperately trying to reach god figures through song and other art forms runs all the way through the album. Only a few moments are reminiscent of the rhymin’ Simon days of his first three decades.
Simon’s last effort, 2018’s In the Blue Light, arrived after a farewell tour. It was somewhat of a letdown after 2016’s Stranger to Stranger, but even the hushed Seven Psalms is more of an upswing in quality than a true fading away. The new record is designed to be listened to in one half-hour mediation. It flows backward and forward like time itself and returns to some lyrical themes about spirituality and our struggle with it as a general conceit. Many of the lyrics are murmured like nocturnal hymns by either Simon or fellow songwriter Edie Brickell, Simon’s wife since 1992.
Listening to this record after a revisit to something like 1972’s Paul Simon or 1986’s Graceland would probably give you stylistic whiplash, but Simon’s always been an artist who blends in with his surroundings quite well. Seven Psalms has more kinship with the quieter folk passages and healing spirituality of his music with Art Garfunkel or even his 1965 debut solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook. But overall, Seven Psalms begins and ends with moonlit reflections (and an actual “amen” by the end). The poppy melodies of the past have sloughed off long ago for reflective musings of an artist perfectly fine with looking at the sunset and enjoying its colors and the sounds of the world it illuminates.
