PLEASANT SORROWS

The mysticism of Paul Simon.

- AMANDA PETRUSICH

On January 15, 2019, Paul Simon dreamed that he was working on a piece called “Seven Psalms.” He got out of bed and scribbled the phrase— alliterative, ancient-feeling—into a spiral notebook. From then on, Simon periodically woke between 3:30 and 5 A.M. to jot down bits of language. Songwriters often speak about their work as a kind of channelling—the job is to be a steady antenna, prepared to receive strange signals. Some messages are more urgent than others. Simon started trying to make sense of what he was being told.

This month, Simon, who is eightyone, released “Seven Psalms,” his fifteenth solo album. It’s a beautiful, mysterious record, composed of a single, thirty-three-minute acoustic track divided into seven movements. Simon’s soft, neighborly voice has yet to be shredded by age or hard living, and its sustained tenderness makes me feel as though everything is going to be O.K. His long discography contains threads of sorrow (“Hello darkness, my old friend,” the gloomy opening line of “The Sound of Silence,” from 1964, has been adopted as a meme), but just as many moments of levity and gratification. Despite being a songwriting virtuoso, Simon tends toward understatement, and his lack of vocal histrionics can make his music seem unusually (and deceptively) effortless.