Music Review: So Beautiful or So What - Paul Simon

I've made no secret on this blog of my high esteem for the music of Paul Simon. I was first introduced to his music 25 years ago when Graceland was released, and it was the first full album I ever bought with my own money. Since then I've been a fan, enjoying his music through Rhythm of the Saints and all that followed - although Songs from the Capeman was a low point in my opinion.


Last year Simon released his latest studio album, So Beautiful or so What, and I've been a bit behind the times in giving it serious attention, and reviewing it here. During leave in June I listened to the album pretty constantly and have found it to be one of the richest pieces of work in Simon's corpus.

Following on the back of Suprise in 2006, So Beautiful or So What retains the rich sound of its predecessor, although with Phil Ramone in the co-producer's chair rather than Brian Eno this time. The songs are rhythmically and melodically accomplished, with a simultaneous catchiness and capacity to surprise - as with previous offerings Simon has an ability here to compose songs which grow and mature to one's ear the more they are listened to.

'Getting Ready for Christmas Day' kicks the album off with a driving rhythm coupled with samples from the sermons of well known Atlanta preacher Reverend J.M. Gates. The preoccupations behind the lyrics are decidedly modern, with a nephew in Iraq ('it's his third time back'), a concern about the credit that Christmas inevitably brings ('from early in November to the last week of December, I've got money matters weighing me down') to a certain wistfulness about a lost past of simpler living ('if I could tell my Mom and Dad that the things we never had, never mattered we were always okay).

'The Afterlife' finds Simon depicting eternity, but with a somewhat mundane twist. This is a world which greyly reflects our own (one is reminded of Lewis' The Great Divorce) with the protagonist revisiting his old place again, and getting tied up in bureaucracy in an attempt to enjoy heaven ('you gotta fill out a form first, and then you stand in the line'). The tone here is somewhat whimsical and playful, but the message is clearly one of organised religion vainly attempting to capture Deity ('Buddha and Moses, and all of the noses from narrow to flat, had to stand in the line just to glimpse the Divine, what'cha think about that?'). But there are glimpses of beauty here also ('after you climb up the ladder of time the Lord God is near, face-to-face in the vastness of space your words disappear, and you feel like you're swimming in a ocean of love and current is strong, but all that remains when you try to explain is a fragment of song').

Similar concerns are evident in Dazzling Blue, with the abilities and limits of science failing to fully resolve the mystery of life and love, whereas Rewrite is more concerned with how we interpret and retell our own stories. The narrative is that of a Vietnam vet trying to write his memoirs in the late evening following employment at a local car wash. His is the work of revisionism, reworking those elements of his story which are uncomfortably painful or angular ('I'll eliminate the pages, where the Father has a breakdown, and he has to leave the family, although he really meant no harm. I'll substitute a car chase and a race across the rooftops, where the Father saves the children and holds them in his arms'). This is a landcape of might-have-been, and might-still-be in the mind of the rewriting author.

The nascent spiritual concerns raised in the first two tracks now find full voice in 'Love in Hard Times'. Here God the Father and Son make a visit to earth, amidst natural beauty and human emotion, leaving again to form more galaxies, amid concerns that the people they meet are slobs. In the absence of direct incarnation, comforting love has to come from other sources, and Simon identifies human relationships as being the main source of comfort in time. The sentiments here are touching, playing on many of the natural human fears and weaknesses that are felt in a world of difficulty and decay ('the light at the edge of the curtain, is the quiet dawn, the bedroom breathes and clicks and clacks, uneasy heartbeat can't relax, but then your hand takes mine, thank God I found you in time'), while there appears to be a note of regret that the theophany depicted at the outset of the track has to be compensated for by mere human love in the meantime.

For me, 'Love is Eternal Sacred Light' is the highpoint of the entire album. What Simon manages to pack into 4.02 minutes of song is utterly breathtaking. Here there is cosmology ('How'd it all begin? Started with a bang, couple of light years later stars and planets sang'), anthropology:

(Earth becomes a farm

Farmer takes a wife

Wife becomes a river and the giver of life

Man becomes machine

Oil runs down his face

Machine becomes a man with a bomb in the marketplace

Bomb in the marketplace, bomb in the marketplace)

and theodicy ('evil is darkness, sight without sigh, a demon that feeds on the mind'). Mixed into all of this is a brief snatch of God's perspective, with millions of people asking him to love them. This is Paul Simon at his song writing best, and for me his ability to handle these kinds of issues in a musically accomplished, intellectually satisfying way, sets him far above all of his singer-songwriter peers. I can think of no example from the catalogues of Dylan, Lennon-McCartney, Morrison, or Cohen which even come close to this kind of complexity or depth. Marvellous stuff.

'Amulet' is an instrumental acoustic guitar solo, which showcases Simon's normally well integrated skills of musicianships, with hints and tones of the 'Something so Right'. This segues effortlessly into 'Questions for the Angels', which again asks some of the big questions that we might have, as well as some truly Samsonic riddles and thought experiments. 'Love and Blessings' is a simple meditation on common grace, with references out to the banking crisis, the limits of science, and the profound pleasure to be found in simple kindness, 'ours to hold, but not to keep'.

The album concludes with the title track, a fitting finish to an album which reaches incredible lyrical depths and musical heights. This is an ode to making the most of it, of capitalising on opportunities, of fulfilling one's potential, as well as our regrettable tendency to put emphasis on all of the wrong things and priorities in life:

Ain’t it strange the way we’re ignorant

How we seek out bad advice

How we jigger it and figure it

Mistaking value for the price

And play a game with time and love

Like a pair of rolling dice

Paul Simon's 12th solo studio album is a rare treasure, from a gifted septuagenarian who is not afraid to mature his songs into his present intellectual, spiritual and emotional location. From a Christian point of view So Beautiful or So What is an astonishing portrait of a man who is clearly searching for truth and reality, amidst the vagaries and uncertainties of modern life. His scarce publicised meeting with John Stott, and this response when asked was religion more in his thoughts,

“I don’t think it's really so much about religion. There are quite a few references to God or in a spiritual sense. And I guess I would have to say from the evidence of this album that I am thinking about it more."

would certainly seem to suggest that Simon is looking for answers to the complex and courageous questions which his latest offering puts forward. It is my sincere prayer that he might find precisely those answers in the truth of Christianity.