The last time Paul Simon played a full concert in New York it was July 22, 2018, and he was capping off his Homeward Bound Farewell Tour in front of roughly 30,000 fans at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. On Monday evening, after seven extremely long and tumultuous years that saw Simon enter his eighth decade, lose nearly all hearing in his left ear, and record the sparse, meditative LP Seven Psalms, Simon returned to New York City for an intimate night of music, new and old, at the Beacon Theatre.
Before playing a note, Simon told the crowd how the concert would unfold. “Tonight’s show has two parts,” he said. “The first is Seven Psalms. It’s a 33-minute piece. It’s uninterrupted. There are no breaks between songs. The second half, we’ll play a bunch of hits, some deep cuts songs that I’ve never played or seldom played. We hope you have a great time.”
The news that a veteran artist is about to play their entire new album would typically elicit silent groans throughout a classic rock audience, or at least a stampede to the bathrooms or bar, but Seven Psalms is a remarkable achievement, and fans have had two years to process it. When he kicked into its opening segment, “The Lord,” the capacity crowd fell into a hushed, reverent silence.
Simon’s hearing issues initially made him think he could never play live again. And it’s likely true that the loud, electric show he brought to arenas and festival grounds back in 2018 is not something he’ll be able to repeat. But Seven Psalms is a soft, acoustic work, and he recreated the chill vibe onstage with an ace band that included guitarists Mark Stewart, Gyan Riley, and Biodun Kuti, bassist Bakithi Kumalo, flute player Nancy Stagnita, and cellist Eugene Friesen.
This tour is officially called “A Quiet Celebration,” and the quiet of Seven Psalms was only punctured by the occasional ringing cellphone or laughter at some of the funnier lines, like “I heard two cows in a conversation/One called the other one a name/In my professional opinion/All cows in the country must bear the blame,” in “My Professional Opinion.”
As Simon explained, the seven parts of the album flow directly into one another, and some of the melodies and refrains are repeated throughout multiple segments. To help the audience follow along, a screen displayed the name of each chapter right as it began. And to help Simon with the harmonies on “The Sacred Harp” and “Wait,” Edie Brickell walked out to a microphone on the side of the stage and locked voices with her husband. Their musical partnership has largely existed outside of the public eye over the past three decades, and it was wonderful to finally witness their chemistry in person.
After a brief intermission, Simon came back for the hits/deep cuts portion of the night. This was rockier territory since the songs on Seven Psalms were constructed specifically to accommodate Simon’s weathered voice, which lacks some of the range and force it had in the past, and now he was going to attempt songs at age 83 that, in some cases, date back to his early twenties.
In a bold move, he opened with “Graceland,” and briefly seemed overwhelmed, unable to hit the difficult notes. But things quickly evened out with a gentle, re-worked “Slip Slidin’ Away,” and he never seemed lost again. “Here’s a song from the Simon and Garfunkel days,” he said after a stellar “Train in the Distance,” one of three Hearts and Bones songs he slipped into the set. “Some of the early songs I wrote for us, I used to put a guitar figure on top the song.” He then teased bits of “I Am a Rock” and “The Sound of Silence” before kicking into “Homeward Bound.”
Unlike the rendition on the Saturday Night Live 50 special earlier this year, he didn’t alter the lyrics to remove the word “cigarettes.” He also didn’t bring out Sabrina Carpenter or his old buddy Artie, even though they finally reconciled after years of bitter estrangement. It was instead the solo version, similar to the one on his 1974 concert LP Live Rhymin’. And it was majestic.
The first true deep cut of the night came when he broke out “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” which he hadn’t performed in a quarter century prior to this tour. It was inspired by R&B singer Johnny Ace, who died in 1954 while playing with a handgun backstage at a concert. The lyrics touch on John F. Kennedy and John Lennon in addition to Ace himself, and images of all three Johns flashed on the screen at the end.
The Hearts and Bone tribute continued with a beautiful “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” one of the many hidden gems on the vastly under-appreciated 1983 LP. (The common narrative that Simon was in a creative slump prior to Graceland simply isn’t true. He just hadn’t had a radio hit in a while.)
Brickell came back onstage for “Under African Skies,” which Simon dedicated to Kumalo, noting he was the last surviving member of the Graceland band. And after a quick flashback to The Rhythm of the Saints with “Spirit Voices” and “The Cool, Cool River,” Brickell returned again for some impressive whistling on set-closer “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” This one required a bit more vocal power than Simon can muster, but the audience gladly helped him out.
The encore began with a joyous “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and a stunning take on “The Boxer” where every person in the Beacon sang along to the “la la lie” chorus. This is such a pivotal New York City song that Lorne Michaels asked Simon to sing it on the first SNL after 9/11. It’s a tale of perseverance and resilience, and it felt like the fighter who “carries the remainders of every glove that laid him down” is now Simon himself.
The band took a bow after the final “la la lie,” but Simon remained onstage, and held up a single finger to signal that one more song was coming. It could only have been “The Sound of Silence.” Simon wrote the song over 60 years ago in the bathroom of his childhood home in Queens, and it became Simon and Garfunkel’s breakthrough hit at the height of the folk rock movement. Hearing it with fresh ears can be difficult after infinite replays on classic rock radio, movie soundtracks, and Time Life Music informercials.
But when he stood alone on the Beacon stage and sang “hello darkness my old friend,” the past 60 years collapsed into one divine moment. The words and melody felt as alive and vibrant as they must have sounded when Simon and Garfunkel first tested the song out before a Greenwich Village coffee house audience when they were still billing themselves as Kane and Garr.
As we’ve seen over and over again, farewell tours rarely stick. But Paul Simon’s A Quiet Celebration tour is nothing like some artists squeezing their fans for more money after promising to go away forever. It’s a victory lap for one of the greatest songwriters of the past century. And if it winds up being the last time, he’s taking a page from the Leonard Cohen playbook and going out on top.
