Only Paul Simon could command the sound of silence like this.
In the opening act of the first of five sold-out shows of his comeback tour at NYC’s Beacon Theatre, the music legend played the entirety of “Seven Psalms,” his 2023 album that was conceived to be listened to in its entirety as a seven-part piece.
After a Simon took the stage to a standing O, embracing it with arms wide open, you could hear a pin drop — as the crowd dutifully obeyed the no-phone directive for taking pics and videos without having their device locked away in a Yondr pouch.
It was part the haunting hush of the less familiar material. And it was part reverence that the 83-year-old Queens native was back playing anything at all on any stage after he had performed what was supposed to be his final concert at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in 2018.
That was the end of a farewell tour that really seemed like a real goodbye — especially after the double whammy of the pandemic and then Simon revealing that he had suffered near-total hearing loss in his left ear in 2023.
But — after working with the Stanford Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss and revamping his entire stage setup to make performing viable again — Simon is back with his “A Quiet Celebration Tour,” which lived up to its billing.
Although he sounded frail and fragile at times in the nakedness of the quiet — no doubt so he could hear better—he was still very much the Paul Simon that everyone was waiting for in the second act, which was all about his solo hits as well as some with Art Garfunkel.
It kicked off with “Graceland,” the title track from his South African that won the Album of the Year Grammy in 1987. The jaunty shimmy immediately energized the crowd, which all of a sudden became much more vocal.
Meanwhile, “Slip Sliding Away” took on new meaning in the delicate deliverer of a man who not so long seemed like he was doing just that — not only professionally but perhaps personally too.
Any pathos faded away when Simon’s longtime wife Edie Brickell joined him for the bit of whistling whimsy on “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” ripping a wave of hand-clapping and singalong joy throughout the theater.
Likewise, the communal crooning to the easy-grooving “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” was both soulful and spiritual.
And by the time he did Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer, it was clear that he was no longer alone, shining a spotlight in the audience during the chorus to amp up the engagement.
But for the final song, “The Sound of Silence,” it was all him. No band, no audience, just Simon bathed in white light, singing and strumming in the still of the quiet that the S&G classic has always celebrated.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
