Paul Simon’s new album is classic Paul Simon: erudite, urbane, observant. Formally unusual, it’s a guitar-led song suite presented as one 35-minute track, and it takes us through the New Yorker’s spiritual musings as he approaches his ultimate destination.
This feels like a final artistic testament akin to David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ or Leonard Cohen’s ‘You Want It Darker’, an album that presents and bookends a mighty career with wit and grace.
The music is musing and quizzical, but shot through with the iron will that defines the 81-year-old’s work. Simon is a writer and artist who has taken big creative and commercial risks during his career and more often than not been rewarded.
‘Seven Psalms’ is a continuation of that in its format, the single track being a surefire way to deter grazing listeners, and force you to bed in for the duration. It’s enormously rewarding, and feels of a piece with his early sound.
One element of that journey is an ecclesiastical one. God is a fleeting element in his catalogue but has shown up more in late era albums, as it did on his debut album with Art Garfunkel, ‘Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.’.
The instrumentation is another tell. Other than the guitar and Simon’s voice, the backing accompaniment is pretty pared back. The ambient bowl tones of Harry Partch pop up gorgeously alongside choral arrangements from British vocal group VOCES8 and Edie Brickell, Simon’s wife. This is a record which is intimate in the truest sense, addressing the only thing you will truly face on your own.
Whether ‘Seven Psalms’ is Simon’s final album is yet to be seen, but it certainly feels like a fitting final chapter. Not a finale in the theatrical sense, or a coda in the musical one, it’s an album of wonderful temperance, of sorrow and joy. It appears to be a final masterpiece from perhaps America’s greatest living songwriter.
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