The Dude Abides
For me, summertime evokes many happy memories from childhood in New England.
The full-throttle joy of spending the first week of school break at the shore. Farm stands brimming with sweet corn, snap peas, dark red cherries and heirloom tomatoes. Nights sleeping on the back porch and reading books for pleasure while fireflies blink in the distance.
These so-called lazy days, filled with more sunshine and ease than the rest of the year, also bring to mind musical memories. Foremost among mine is Paul Simon’s legendary concert in New York City’s Central Park. On that perfect summer night in mid-August 1991, 600,000 people gathered on the great lawn to listen to Simon tell his song-stories, his sweet tenor seemingly untouched by the years since he first came to prominence on the 1960s folk scene with his partner Art Garfunkle.
This summer, Simon, a few months shy of his 70th birthday, has given fans a new soundtrack to make happy memories by in his new album, “So Beautiful or So What,” his 12th solo studio album. Simon said it the bluegrass-hued album is his “best work in 20 years.” And he’s right.
Moreover, “So Beautiful or So What,” which dropped in April to wide critical acclaim, is one of the most beautiful, gracefully powerful and memorable collections of spiritual musical musings in recent memory.
Steve Stockman, a Protestant clergyman and music critic from Northern Ireland who writes prolifically about the intersection of faith and popular music, proclaimed Simon’s latest album, “so God drenched that it could win best Christian album of the year.”
The “best Christian album of the year” from a fellow who famously described himself in a long-ago lyric as one part of “one-and-one-half wandering Jews”?
Simon is, in fact, Jewish and is not shy (as is evidenced in the “making of” DVD that accompanies the deluxe version of the album) about saying that he is far from religious. However, he admits freely that, “There seems to be a theme in the album — not intentional. I noticed it after the first five or six songs that God seemed to be in four or five of them.
“And it’s funny because for someone who’s not a religious person, God comes up a lot in my songs … There was a show I did about a year and a half ago and Paul McCartney was there and he came back afterward and said, ‘Aren’t you Jewish?’”
It seems that Stockman has a valid point.
Listen to the lyrics from the song “Love in Hard Times”:
“God and his only son
Paid a courtesy call on Earth one Sunday morning
Orange blossoms opened their fragrant lips
Songbirds sang from the tips of cotton roots
Old folks wept
For his love in these hard times
‘Well, better be going’
Said the restless lord to his son
´There are galaxies yet to be born
Creation is never done
On his song, “Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” Simon samples some archival audio from a 1941 sermon by J.M. Gates, an African-American preacher and gospel singer from Georgia who recorded some 200 sermons in his time. Gates’ “Christmas” sermon was the last he recorded before dying in 1945.
In the song, Simon samples Gates saying:
Getting ready, ready for your prayers,
“I’m going and see my relatives in a distant land.”
Getting ready, getting ready for Christmas Day.
And Simon himself sings:
If I could tell my Mom and Dad that the things we never had
Never mattered we were always okay
Getting ready, oh ready, ready for Christmas Day
Ready, getting ready
For the power and the glory and the story of the
Christmas Day
Then there’s Simon’s “Rewrite,” we he talks about rewriting (his life?) and “chang[ing] the ending.”
He sings:
I’d no idea
That you were there
When I said help me, help me, help me, help me
Thank you, for listening to my prayer
That lyric is reminiscent of something the author Anne Lamott (surely a literary soul sister to Simon if ever there were one) has said, that the two best prayers are “Help me, help me, help me” and “thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Throughout the 10 tracks on the album, Simon tells stories in his inimitable way, backed by sometimes orchestral, sometimes world-music-sounding, ever folksy musical arrangements that highlight his virtuoso guitar playing as well as his singular vocals and the spiritual strengths of his lyrics. Simon spins vivid tales about love, growing older, faith and pilgrimage, each dripping with spiritual longing and a certain unexpected joy.
In the album’s liner notes, penned by Simon’s friend and fellow musician Elvis Costello, the transcendent themes that run through “So Beautiful or So What” do not go unnoticed.
“These days it might court shallow mockery to sing so openly of our humanity, mortality and divinity but not with music to make these themes fly or words containing such wit, grace and humility,” Costello writes. “In ‘Love and Hard Times,’ two-thirds of the Trinity arrive on earth only to disagree of who and what is worthy of salvation. This bold and, for any other songwriting, completely humbling piece of composition took my breath away on first hearing.”
Costello is not alone in his reaction to this album. It’s a keeper, an absolute gift to the listener, right up there with Simon’s epic “Graceland” and “Rhythm of the Saints” albums.
Whether the listener is a “believer” or not, “So Beautiful or So What” is a masterpiece that surely will provide a rich soundtrack for this summer and for many summers to come.
A version of this column appeared via Religion News Service.
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