Paul Simon, 83, has simply changed his mind about a farewell to touring that he announced in 2018, with a valedictory arena tour that ended with a park concert in Queens. He had more to say and sing.
He’s back on the road with a relatively intimate, scaled-down postscript: his A Quiet Celebration tour. It’s booked into theaters selected for their acoustics, and it’s made possible by an advanced monitoring system that helps him cope with his recent severe hearing loss.
Simon played to a reverently attentive audience on Monday night at his hometown sanctuary, the Beacon Theater. When the refurbished, regilded venue reopened in 2009, Simon was its first performer. And on Monday, he stepped onstage smiling broadly and announced, “I love playing in this room.”
Simon has been making poetic, tuneful pop hits — songs that found mass audiences with lapidary craftsmanship and terse, enigmatic insights — since the 1960s. He had less commercial success with larger formats: his 1980 movie about a songwriter, “One-Trick Pony,” and his 1998 musical, “The Capeman.” But he has still been thinking bigger than individual songs.
In 2023, Simon released “Seven Psalms,” a continuous 33-minute suite of songs about the brevity, fragility and preciousness of life — “Two billion heartbeats and out / Or does it all begin again?” — and the unknowability of God. “The Lord is a meal for the poorest of the poor,” he sang, but also, “The Lord is the ocean rising / The Lord is a terrible swift sword.”
He opened his Beacon Theater concert with a full performance of that album wearing a blazer, without his usual ball cap. The suite’s sections are loosely held together by delicate guitar picking patterns, recurring vocal lines and occasional refrains. But they also explore enigmatic tangents and dissolve into abstract sounds. In the best way, “Seven Psalms” sounds like someone thinking aloud, melodically and philosophically.
Simon introduced guitar motifs that were seamlessly picked up by his band’s two guitarists, Mark Stewart and Gyan Riley, as he sang. Other band members joined in, at precise moments, with exotic percussion — metallic instruments that were invented by a band member, the percussionist Jamey Haddad, and glass cloud-chamber bowls that rang like church bells — and countermelodies from flute and viola. The suite was by turns awe-struck and droll, devout yet questioning and humble but proudly, thoroughly idiosyncratic.
After a break, Simon returned dressed more informally in jeans, baseball hat, T-shirt and a purple velour jacket with a set that reminded fans how pop can push boundaries. Long before indie-rock bands strove to come up with a new ensemble sound in every recording, Simon was constantly changing up his productions. He has raced across idioms, from folky pop to orchestral buildups. His recorded legacy hopscotches geographical and musical borders; he has always kept his ears stimulated.
So at the Beacon on Monday night, he mixed a handful of hits with some of his most musically demanding songs. The set featured “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” with a structure that leaps among ballad, shuffle and a Minimalist Philip Glass coda, and two pinpoint, rhythmically intricate songs from “The Rhythm of the Saints,” “Spirit Voices” and “The Cool, Cool River.” One misplaced syncopation could have derailed either one.
It was a concert that prized subtlety, not force. The volume was moderate, not coercive; Matt Chamberlain, on drums, often played with brushes. And when Simon’s voice flagged, as it sometimes did, there was always another detail to enjoy: Riley’s bluesy electric guitar lines; a cameo appearance by Edie Brickell, Simon’s wife, whistling in “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”; or a ferocious, perpetual-motion piano solo from Mick Rossi at the end of “The Cool, Cool River,” after Simon sang, “Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears.”
Between songs, Simon spoke about musical constructions. He teased instantly recognizable “guitar figures” from Simon & Garfunkel songs before playing a weary, countryish version of his touring-musician’s lament, “Homeward Bound.” He explained “Rewrite” — sung by a burned-out character wishing he could rewrite his life story — as growing out of a beat and a quick-fingered guitar lick.
Simon’s songs have had grown-up concerns for decades. He sang about parenthood in “Graceland” and “St. Judy’s Comet.” He sang about inevitable disillusionment in “Slip Slidin’ Away.” He sang about reluctant breakups, wistfully, in “Train in the Distance” and drolly in “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” And after explaining how he saw a song title in a photo caption, he sang about romance, art, consumerism and the power of music in “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” in the pointillistic arrangement from his 2018 album “In the Blue Light.”
His reedy voice is weaker and scratchier than it once was, but he was still game, reaching for high notes in “Slip Slidin’ Away” and “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” The restrained volume and the age of the audience made the room reluctant to sing along until near the end of the set. But when “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” arrived, and when Simon suggested “Sing!” during “The Boxer,” loud singalongs sprang up. For all his intricacies, he always knew how to write a hook.
Paul Simon’s A Quiet Celebration tour continues at the Beacon Theater on Wednesday and runs through Aug. 3 in Seattle; tour.paulsimon.com.
Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.
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