Paul Simon at the Beacon Theater: Quiet, Intricate, Masterly
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.'
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