Paul Simon goes where inspiration takes him. He did it when he split from Art Garfunkel at the duo’s peak popularity, when he opened the solo debut with a reggae number recorded in Kingston at an unsuspecting time, a year before the Wailers went to press. Catch a Firewhen he brought the sound of South Africa to the world with graceland. All things that we didn’t expect from him, just as no one thought that the musician, who is now 81 years old, would publish a work like Seven Psalms, a 33-minute suite that appeared to him in a dream. He had hinted that his last album would be him Stranger to Stranger from seven years ago. But she still had something to say.
From a certain point of view, it was inevitable that Simon would make a record like this. We’re still talking about someone who wrote modern songs tying up to gospel traditions (Loves me like a rock) and religious hymns (Bridge Over Troubled Water). And then questions of a spiritual nature have always been part of his repertoire, since Mother and Child Reunion until the 2011 album So Beautiful or So What where he placed some Questions for the Angels: “Will I wake up from these violent dreams with hair as white as the moon in the morning?”.
In the new album, questions become commands, like when in Your Forgiveness invites you to immerse your hand “in the water of Heaven, in the divine imagination”. Central to the disc are the concepts of transience and life after death. And after all, if there is one who knows how to come to terms with life in songs, that is Paul Simon. He also does it in Seven Psalms. Fragments of texts appeared to him in a dream, literally. The final result is both the testimony of his skill as a songwriter, for how he elaborated them, and the fruit of the idea of evoking this dreamlike state.
The music is severe, sometimes solemn, as befits a psalm. But it’s also surprisingly diverse. Simon is a great guitarist and here his playing has an intricate and particular beauty, for example in the blues psalm My Professional Opinion. Layered percussion, vocal harmonies (British Voces8) and strings add texture to shroud-like arrangements. And at the end of the album, the voice of Edie Brickell, wife of the singer-songwriter, is heard.
But it is Paul Simon’s talent in evoking a spirituality that is also earthly that makes the record engaging, we are still talking about one of the greatest American songwriters ever. “I heard two cows talking / One insulted the other / My professional opinion / is that all the cows in the country should be responsible,” Simon sings, showing that he hasn’t lost his sense of humor, despite the character of the album.
From a recurring fragment titled The Lord we learn that “the Lord is my sound engineer, the Lord is my producer, the Lord is the music I hear / down in the valley of the elusive”. And the ending in which Simon and Brickell sing in harmony “kids, get ready, it’s time to go home” is exactly what you expect from a great author with a wealth of wisdom accumulated over decades.
From Rolling Stone US.