“A FEW years ago, in 2016, just after I did Stranger To Stranger, I had this ping in my head,” says Paul Simon. “It seemed to be saying, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’ I thought to myself, I’m not going to write anything again, I’ve run out of ideas. And I was quite happy about that.”
Simon revisited his back catalogue two years’ later with an album called In The Blue Light, re-recording obscure album tracks from the 1970s and ’80s, but he seemed to be at peace with the idea that he’d never write again. “And then suddenly, boom, I have this dream and slowly, over the course of a year, this entire album flows out of me.”
That album was Seven Psalms, his 15th solo studio album. It’s a titanic piece of work: a 33-minute, seven-part continuous song cycle that’s a stately meditation on death and spirituality, largely based around Simon’s voice and acoustic guitar. It slyly references music he’s made over the past 60 years while also drawing together some of his ongoing lyrical concerns: the big questions of life, love and mortality, the relationship between the earthly and the spiritual.
It converges with several other significant projects that Simon has been working on for a while. There was Miracle And Wonder, a revealing six-hour podcast series culled from dozens of interviews he gave to the author Malcolm Gladwell. And there’s also In Restless Dreams, an epic three-and-a-half-hour documentary film, directed by Alex Gibney, which traces Simon’s career over the past seven decades, from child star to elder statesman of American song.
What should have been
