Sleep without pauses – Kommersant

Former member of the duo Simon & Garfunkel Paul Simon released a new album “Seven Psalms”, which, according to the musician’s own admission, he literally dreamed about. Unraveling the master’s dreams Igor Gavrilov.

American Paul Simon became famous in the 1960s in a duet with Art Garfunkel. His authorship includes songs for which no exalted epithet would be excessive: “The Sound Of Silence”, “The Boxer”, “Mrs. Robinson, Bridge Over Troubled Water. And the cornerstone of his solo career was the album “Graceland” (1986), in connection with which the term world beat was often used.

Simon last released a collection of new original songs in 2016. It was the Stranger To Stranger album. Then he was still quite actively touring, and life itself threw up themes for songs. Despite the imperturbable appearance, Simon has a sense of humor, just remember the song “You Can Call Me Al”, a light little thing, written under the impression of a meeting with composer Pierre Boulez. In “Stranger To Stranger” Paul Simon played along with his favorite afrobeat, his own life experiences and the melody of his good friend Sting. After this album, Paul Simon released a desperately “farewell” disc “In The Blue Light”, for which he reworked several of his not-so-famous songs in a sentimental-melancholy vein. Everything on this album seemed to indicate that the musician would never return to the studio.

Paul Simon gave his last solo concert in August 2019. By this time, something new was already happening in his mind. Six months earlier, he had heard a voice in a dream: “You’re going to record the Seven Psalms album.” When Simon woke up, he automatically wrote down these words, but he did not understand at all what to do with it. Two or three times a week he woke up at about four in the morning because new words came to him. He began to gather them together.

Paul Simon tells all this in a five-minute trailer that preceded the release of the album. He likes to talk about music in a magical way, but in this short film, the magic is already in how the 81-year-old musician rediscovers sound. Diamonds. Bells. Chorus. Solo flute. Harmonium. A living classic, endowed with the gift of weaving light into a melody, as if touching the musical substance for the first time.

Simon insists that the entire album should be listened to in its entirety, without pauses, despite the fact that it consists of seven pieces and each has a title. The entire array of works, according to the musician, is his argument with himself on the topic of faith.

The first part of the array is called “The Lord” (“Lord”). In his lyrics, Paul Simon, just like in music, revisits concepts that he seemed to understand many years ago. “The Lord is food for the poorest of the poor and a door open to the wanderer.” And a little later: “The COVID virus is also the Lord… The Lord is a smashing sword.” Presenting the listener with a carefully cut acoustic guitar riff that evokes the best of Robert Plant’s folk work, Simon deliberately and regularly changes tempo, as if an old man stumbles on his daily walk along the ocean.

The acoustic guitar remains the main instrument in the song “Love Is Like A Braid”, and Paul Simon again plays with the tempo, however, without even speeding up to the middle. What is more important in this song is how the orchestral strings or the gloomy rumble of the synthesizer smoothly roll up to the foreground and just as gently fade into the shadows.

An unexpected twist is the blues “My Professional Opinion”, in which Paul Simon’s voice is similar to both his namesake McCartney and Rod Stewart. In this track, Simon takes on a light satirical note, talking about how an ordinary conversation in our world has turned into continuous swearing and hatred (and we are all to blame for this). The only one whose opinion matters is the Lord, and here the singer again sings the broken verses of “The Lord” (he will return to them later). In the song “Your Forgiveness”, Paul Simon talks about forgiveness, and for this he needs two completely different melodies with different meter within one part of the album. The use of the Spanish guitar subtly reminds here of Omar Torres’ guitar in Boris Grebenshchikov’s song “Not Fate”.

In the second half of the album, various kinds of instruments from exotic shops appear, such as the “rain stick”, tabla and Indian bells. The air already almost smells of sandalwood, but Paul Simon does not pinch with pop exoticism, and in the song “The Sacred Harp” the main emphasis is on the voice of his wife, Edie Brickell.

Despite the short running time (33 minutes), consecutive listening to “Seven Psalms” is ultimately a rather tedious process: many successful finds are repeated, and thoughts seem chaotic. Rather, the general sound space of the album pleases, in which Paul Simon, it seems, could be endlessly. The album doesn’t really sound, but it’s like a dream, and that’s exactly what they don’t do now.