Paul Simon follows his muse wherever it leads him, whether or not that meant leaving Simon & Garfunkel at their industrial peak, or opening his debut solo album with “Mom and Youngster Reunion,” a reggae monitor recorded in Kingston a full yr earlier than the Wailers launched Catch a Fireplace, or serving to South African township jive go worldwide with Graceland. No person anticipated him to do these issues, and equally, nobody was anticipating the 81 year-old singer-songwriter’s latest launch—Seven Psalms, a 33-minute suite whose title and idea actually got here to him in a dream. Simon had instructed that 2016’s Stranger to Stranger, his final album of latest materials, may be his last assertion. However befitting an iconic wordsmith, he’s again with extra to say.
Musically, Seven Psalms is in some methods additionally inevitable. Simon did, in any case, write trendy classics within the gospel (“Loves Me Like a Rock”) and hymnal (“Bridge Over Troubled Water”) traditions. And non secular questions have lengthy fueled his songwriting, typically from sudden angles, from “Mom and Youngster Reunion” all the way in which to 2011’s So Stunning or So What, the place touchdown in “The Afterlife” resembled a visit to the DMV and his “Questions for the Angels” included, “Will I get up from these violent goals/With my hair as white because the morning moon?”
Right here such considerations aren’t mere questions however directives: “Dip your hand in heaven’s waters/God’s creativeness,” he sings on “Your Forgiveness.” This trip, mortality and what comes subsequent are the music’s meat. Taking inventory in life has all the time been one in all Simon’s lyrical specialties, and he does so all through Seven Psalms. The lyrics got here to him in fragments whereas the songwriter dreamt, and what he did with them is each a testomony to arduous craft and a fairly ingenious rendering of their preliminary dream-state. The music is critical, even solemn, simply because the format suggests—you don’t boogie all the way down to a psalm. But it surely’s additionally surprisingly wide-ranging. Simon’s all the time been a masterful guitarist, and his taking part in right here has a cobwebbed magnificence, notably on the blues-as-psalm “My Skilled Opinion.” Subtly layered percussion, shut vocal harmonies from the British choir VOCES8, and scratchy strings add texture to the shroud-like preparations; so, late within the album, does the voice of Simon’s spouse, Edie Brickell.
What makes this music join is Simon’s means to make a non secular setting really feel down-to-earth, what you may count on from one in all American pop music’s best conversational songwriters. “I heard two cows in a dialog/One referred to as the opposite one a reputation/In my skilled opinion/All cows within the nation should bear the blame,” Simon sings, exhibiting us that he hasn’t misplaced his humorousness, nonetheless somber the setting. In a single recurring fragment, dubbed “The Lord,” we be taught that “The Lord is my engineer/The Lord is my report producer/The Lord is the music I hear/Deep within the valley of elusive.” When he and Brickell end this expansive work by harmonizing, “Kids, prepare/It’s time to come back residence/Amen,” it has the sort of finality you count on from a terrific composer summoning many many years of accrued knowledge.
