“I’ve been thinking about the great migration”, sings Paul Simon, opening Seven Psalms, a seven-part folk suite that he offers in the form of a single 33-minute work. This “great migration” which concerns the eminent songwriter 81 years is of course death. His, of course, which is no longer an abstraction in his eyes given his age.
The long folk poem he unveils comes from a dream, as he explained in a short film released earlier this spring on YouTube. One night in February 2019, he dreamed of a voice telling him that he was working on a work called Seven Psalms. Then, from that moment, Paul Simon regularly got up in the wee hours to write. Or rather to transcribe sentences that he received in a waking dream state.
It is not daring to assume that it is a testament work. As much because of the age of its author as the scope of what he seeks to embrace in this work. Guitar in hand, he reflects aloud on his journey, but also on what concerns all human beings, on the beings and things that surround us and on the transcendence to which we aspire, perhaps in spite of ourselves. “This track is about the debate I have with myself about whether to believe or not,” he announced in the album’s trailer.
The approach is less literal than symbolic. You can’t sum up the world in seven songs. Unless you are a poet. Paul Simon describes less than he evokes by unexpectedly juxtaposing touching images. “Tears and flowers dry up over time,” he sings. Memories leave us, melodies and rhymes, when the cold wind blows…” There is empathy and surrender in his words. And something like gratitude in his singing.
Essentially folk, apart from a bluesy segment imbued with country and gospel (My Professional Opinion), Seven Psalms is crossed by a recurring musical theme, a rich riff played on the guitar on which Paul Simon enumerates what God is, in his eyes. He speaks of it as a “great engineer”, “a face in the atmosphere”, “the virgin forest”, “a foreigner from elsewhere”, but also as the “COVID virus” and “the sea level rise”. God, in short, is in everyone and in everything, the beautiful as well as the threatening.
Seven Psalms, although stamped with religiosity, nevertheless remains a profane work, which draws sacred imagery towards philosophy. It is the symbolic poem of a single man, of a sound painter mastering rhythm (his changing phrasing is an instrument in itself) and color: he put flutes here, discreet choirs there, xylophone, etc., composing a fresco with rich and evocative timbres.
Paul Simon is not alone in the face of the end he contemplates. There are these musicians and the music that surrounds it. There is also the voice of his longtime companion, Edie Brickell, with whom he sings the last two songs in duet: The Sacred Harp and especially Waitaddressed to death… “Wait, I’m not ready/I’m just picking up my gear/Wait, my hand don’t shake/I still have a clear mind”, he sings.
Then, it’s Edie Brickell who slips into the song: “Life is a shooting star […] Paradise is beautiful / It’s almost like home, ”she breathes, as if to reassure her old lover. How not to be heartbroken when, in the last bars, their voices unite in an “amen” where we feel the acceptance of the inevitable and their great love?
folklore
Seven Psalms
Paul Simon
Owl Records/Sony