What a gem this is from Paul Simon. Just over 30 minutes long, Seven Psalms is the meditative endpoint for the folk-pop of his youth. Linked as a continuous piece of music, the seven songs find the 81-year-old contemplating death and testing the possibilities of faith. The results are compact but profound, like a pocket-sized psalter from Simon’s Jewish upbringing or a Christian book of hours, an aid to devotion.
The album contains his first new material since 2016. The idea for it came to him in a dream four years ago. The music bridges mysticism and melodicism. Acoustic guitar chords ripen and linger, like time unspooling. Gongs and bells shimmer, a mind-expanding effect. The style unfolds in the same landscape but at a far distance from his Simon and Garfunkel days.
It opens with Simon singing about a “great migration” of souls in “The Lord”. His words are accompanied by a rolling riff that seems to have migrated from a 1970s English psych-folk song. He sings clearly but quietly, an inward register. His Lord is variously imagined as pantheistic, charitable and angry. Agnosticism surfaces later on with a neatly rhymed reason. “I have my reasons to doubt”, he sings, “Two billion heartbeats and out.”
Leonard Cohen’s last album You Want It Darker comes to mind, with its synagogue choir and reckoning with Jewish faith. Seven Psalms ends with church bells and a chanted “amen”, originally a Hebrew term. But spirituality in Simon’s songs is usually personal rather than denominational or doctrinal, and so it proves here.
“Love Is Like a Braid” alludes to a crisis which “broke me like a twig in a winter gale”, evoked by a rumble of distortion. The breakdown is mended by the nurturing quality of love, which in turn is soundtracked by a gracefully flowing harmony. “My Professional Opinion” ups the tempo with an irrepressible blues groove. “Your Forgiveness” is blown elegantly hither and thither by wind and string arrangements as Simon sings about religious scepticism.
A wide variety of percussive tones adds body to the music, like the fast clockwork rhythms in “Trail of Volcanoes”. Simon’s wife, singer Edie Brickell, duets on “The Sacred Harp” and “Wait”. “I need you here by my side,” he sings at the close. The “you” expands outwards to us, his listeners, the congregation for a songwriter still capable of touching greatness.
★★★★★
‘Seven Psalms’ is released by Owl Records/Legacy Recordings
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