Old people think about death plenty, I’m sure. But I bet not nearly as much as younger people think about death when they think about old people.
Paul Simon appeared a relatively hale 83 years old at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Minneapolis on Tuesday, at the second show of a three-night stand. The severe hearing loss that he’d once expected to keep him from singing publicly forever has healed enough for him to embark on a tour he’s calling "A Quiet Celebration." Simon played two sets: the first contained his latest album, a song cycle called Seven Psalms, in its entirety, and the second was a selection of oldies. Sure, he was seated for most of the show, but so were the rest of us, including many of the 11 other musicians.
That didn’t stop me from Googling “Paul Simon health” when I got home, a search that resulted in alarming headlines like “Paul Simon's heartbreaking 'time's up' confession after health battle.” Fortunately, the internet was just being the internet: The full quote—“my generation’s time is up”—acknowledged mortality without suggesting Simon personally expected to kick it suddenly anytime soon, and the “health battle” was the hearing loss I already knew about. Phew.
Still, 83 is pretty old, as most 83 year olds would likely be the first to admit. Simon no longer sings like a young man. He’s never exactly been a belter, but his voice is now weathered and delicate, his articulation a touch less crisp. The boyish brightness of tone that remained into his 70s has dimmed and his range has narrowed. That falsettoed “Ro-sie!” on “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard”? So not gonna happen.
And an old man’s voice can recast a younger man’s songs. Take “Graceland,” which began Simon’s second set of the evening. It’s always been, like any song even peripherally about Elvis must be, partly about death, or about heaven at least. Now when Simon sings “I have reason to believe/We all will be received/In Graceland” he could have been an advance scout for the afterworld. And on Simon’s next song, “Slip Slidin’ Away,” that perfect distillation of mid-30s malaise, he was now a man who feared he’d soon lose his life not metaphorically but literally.
But to hear these songs only in this way is to cheapen them. Both, for instance, are also about being a dad: “Graceland” is about dragging your nine-year-old to a tourist trap for a forced bonding experience, “Slip Slidin’ Away” ends with a father being unable to communicate with his son. Simon further showcased his paternal side with “St. Judy's Comet,” an attempted lullaby from 1973. (“If I can't sing my boy to sleep/Well it makes your famous daddy/Look so dumb,” still gets the laugh it should.)
Yes, Paul Simon made Divorced Dad Rock before that became a cheap joke, or maybe just before a generation of divorced dads exhausted our sympathies with their excuses. Even his typical look—sports jacket over a T-shirt, which you better believe he wore last night—would become something of a divorced dad uniform. (Though this show was no audiovisual extravaganza, it did include a costume change: For the second set Simon emerged in a purple velour jacket and a ballcap.)
Shake off those thoughts of the grave, then, and you could hear many of these songs return to Simon’s great theme: regret. How to acknowledge regret. How to avoid regret. How to live with regret. And now, because Simon is old, how to age with regret. Do we hear “Slip Slidin’ Away” differently if the woman who tells Paul “a bad day's when I lie in bed/ And think of things that might have been” is also in her 80s?
Simon sang three songs from 1983’s Hearts and Bones, which may be his most underrated album but is certainly his most divorced—a neat trick for a newlywed, though he’d split from second wife Carrie Fisher by the following summer. (Fisher’s generous reading of their relationship: “I was really good for material, but when it came to day-to-day living, I was a little more than he could take.“)
The evenhanded “Train in the Distance” is a quintessentially Paul Simon breakup song; where many of his peers and betters made art in response to imagined female betrayal, relationships just kind of end in Paul’s world. (Though that’s just how a guy whose fault it is would act, no?) The song ends on the assertion that “the thought that life could be better/Is woven indelibly/Into our hearts and our brains,” a statement less optimistic than it first sounds. That thought tells us we’re missing out on what we could have if we don’t leave behind what we already have, and then it tells us to look back on what we left behind and wonder if we were wrong. The fear of creating regrets creates regrets.
The equal and opposite counterpoint to “Train in the Distance” is ’“Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” which imagines the surrealist painter and his wife settling in ’50s NYC and dancing at night to the Moonglows and the Five Satins. It’s a lovely idyll of domesticity and abundance, one that may have seemed elusive (to Simon at least) when Hearts and Bones came out. But again, it came across differently—more achievable now, perhaps—after we’d just heard Simon harmonize with his wife of 30 years, Edie Brickell, on the Graceland song “Under African Skies.”
Simon introduced the third song from Hearts and Bones, “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” by talking about how he heard of the R&B singer’s accidental suicide—a story the song itself relates in the first verse. (A lot of his stories were redundant like that.) The singer lives through Ace’s death, and JFK’s, and John Lennon’s and it’s unclear what he learns, except that the deaths pile up with the years.
We’re back to death then, huh? Well yes, and we’re not done with it, because I still haven’t discussed the first set. Simon has cutely called Seven Psalms “an argument I’m having with myself about belief—or not,” and it’s certainly a thickety work, both lyrically and, with its arrayed flutes and strings and glockenspiels, musically as well. And we’ve never heard it sung in any voice but the one Simon has now.
The first words Simon sang last night were “I’ve been thinking about the great migration,” and damned if I know whether to capitalize the “g” and the “m” there. Is he pondering the exodus of Black Americans from the South, or the passing of souls into the next world or both?
Much of Seven Psalms is slippery in that way, its most seemingly concrete images misleading you into following along with Simon’s reveries. Built around a memorable guitar curlicue, its opening song, “The Lord,” reappears throughout the album as a motif, the shifty deity assuming various guises including “a meal for the poorest of the poor,” “the path I slip and I slide on” (heh), and “my own personal joke.”
By the finale, “Wait,” death is imminent. As Simon protests “I’m not ready” and wishes for “a dreamless transition,” Brickell reassures him, “Heaven is beautiful/It’s almost like a home.” And it occurred to me that while mortality may be a preoccupation of aging rockers, probably no major songwriter thinks about the afterlife as much as Simon does these days?
Simon even included a song called “The Afterlife” (“You got to fill out a form first/And then you wait in the line”) on his 2011 album So Beautiful or So What, And six years later, on Stranger to Stranger, he located heaven “Six trillion light years away” and promised “we’re all gonna get there someday”—before ominously and/or comically adding “but not you.”
Simon has had one foot in the next life for over a decade now, yet what his music has conspicuously lacked is dread. He seems curious about what comes next. As Old Man Rock goes, I cherish Simon’s ‘10s nearly as much as I do Dylan’s ‘00s, and find it a more welcome path to trod, even as someone who expects nothing after life except an eternity of our old friend darkness.
And Simon has always been cagey about his beliefs. I love the anecdote about Paul McCartney showing up backstage after a show and asking him, “Aren’t you Jewish?” He is, by birth, yet his songs are awash in Christian ideas of grace and redemption, not to mention the afterlife. That may just come from being an American artist, or loving Black gospel music, but it’s certainly peculiar.
Listening to Seven Psalms didn’t help you sort out those beliefs, though the god of the Old Testament did appear in lyrics like “The Covid virus is the Lord/The Lord is the oceans rising.” On the bluesy and somewhat garrulous “My Professional Opinion,” Simon disavowed being a preacher. He dispensed truisms like “Nothing dies of too much love” and testified “I lived a life of pleasant sorrow/Till the real deal came.” When husband and wife harmonized together on a final “amen,” well… something had certainly been said.
I’ll admit that my mind roamed a bit, just as it always did in church, and not necessarily in spiritual directions. Yet parts were beautiful, others pretty, many moving, some captivating. I was less effusive than the woman behind me and less dismissive than her grouchy husband. In previewing this show, I wrote that the album felt both slight and overdone to me, but what I think I meant was that it felt personal, and personal music is best experienced in person.
The crowd was respectful for this hushed set and, in some cases, rapt, even if they did accompany Simon with an incredible range of audible respiratory ailments. Still, they were relieved to finally be able to applaud after 45 minutes of holding it in. Audiences may pay to listen to music, but they also pay to be heard, for the opportunity to affirm their enjoyment. And this crowd applauded with great determination. Sometimes it seemed as though they wanted to applaud Simon for still being around to applaud.
I’d seen Simon twice before. The first time was a mildly depressing 2006 show at the Borgata in Atlantic City. He was touring in support of Surprise, a new album from which he played no new songs, and turned in a pro performance to a crowd seated in the folding chairs of a dreary casino ballroom. “What a pathetic empire we have,” I scribbled in my notes.
The next time was just over a decade later, at Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires festival, and I compared his set to John Prine’s the day before:
Where Prine was wistful, Simon was autumnal. His onetime chirp now darkened and more frail, Simon sang some of his most familiar Simon & Garfunkel material, beginning with "America" and closing with "The Sound of Silence," as sentimental throngs swayed drunkenly, arms slung across one another's shoulders. Simon seemed to be paying tribute to his younger self, or maybe saying goodbye to it, and the intricate string and woodwind arrangements, performed by the yMusic ensemble, didn't so much reimagine these oldies as dress them to be sent off to sea in burning Viking burial ships.
And just think, Paul was a spry 75 then.
However it may have sounded to me in 2017, though, Simon hasn’t consigned his ’60s tunes to Valhalla just yet. He sang three numbers from his & Garfunkel youth last night, beginning with “Homeward Bound,” which was a suitably weary if ironic choice, given Simon’s relief at being back on the road. (Then again, maybe “home” is “heaven”—see how hard it is to stop this game once you get going?) But the two S&G numbers Simon exhumed from his encore felt out of place to me.
Simon has clung firmly to “The Boxer” over the years—with a Queens boy’s unshakable bravado, he hauled it out for the first Saturday Night Live after 9/11. Yet there’s a whiff of poverty tourism to its down-and-outery, and some of the lyrics betray his worst tendencies; Simon’s confession that he “took some comfort” from “the whores on 7th Avenue” muddles gentility and frankness with a bookish immaturity.
More to the point, the song feels age-inappropriate. I just can’t hear in it the swagger of a punch-drunk lifer still standing despite the odds; it will forever register to me as the boast of a kid with his first shiner bluffing that he’s gone more rounds than he has.
And then there’s “The Sound of Silence,” Simon’s intended closer. You love it, I know. It’s his signature song, and its title may have increased resonance after his deafness. But I still can’t shake the callow Holden Caulfieldness of it all; if it had been written 50 years later it might have included the word “sheeple.” There’s a reason it both worked all too well and sounded like a parody when Disturbed covered it.
Throw in the feckless “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” which has always struck me as kinda jive (though eternal props to drummer Steve Gadd for that studio-pro groove), and you had an encore not for me, yet for the ages. All three songs are classics, whatever I think, destined to outlive Simon in a way that he surely knows Seven Psalms will not. Between morose singalongs of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” these are the tunes we’ll return to when he’s gone. Such is pop stardom.
Yet because Simon flubbed a few lyrics, he offered us an unexpected bonus: "The 59th Street Bridge Song” or, as you probably know it, “Feelin' Groovy.” Its dippy hippieism only ages better the further we get from the ’60s, and it cleared the air of any musty seriousness. Darkness may be Paul’s old friend, after all, and the Lord may be his personal joke, but life, he loves you.
Setlist
Set 1
The Lord
Love Is Like A Braid
My Professional Opinion
Your Forgiveness
Trail of Volcanoes
The Sacred Harp
Wait
Set 2
Graceland
Slip Slidin' Away
Train in the Distance
Homeward Bound
The Late Great Johnny Ace
St. Judy's Comet
Under African Skies
Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the WarSpirit Voices
Mother and Child Reunion
Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard
Encore
50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
The Boxer
The Sound of Silence
The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)
