Out today (May 19th) is Paul Simon's latest album, Seven Psalms. The 33-minute, seven-movement song cycle is intended to be listened to as one continuous piece. The entirely acoustic-based new set, which was produced by Simon and Kyle Crusham, includes choral elements from the noted British vocal ensemble VOCES8, as well as an appearance by Simon's wife, singer/songwriter Edie Brickell and jazz great Wynton Marsalis.
A trailer for the new album has been released including excerpts from an upcoming Simon documentary, titled In Restless Dreams.
With Seven Psalms clocking in less than 35 minutes, the set is among the shortest in Paul Simon's modern catalogue. A while back, Simon explained the physical and audio constraints for keeping vinyl records short, arguably, made for a better listening experience: ["You listen to music for 22 minutes and then, if you wanted to, you flipped the record over and you listened to another 22 minutes. What I think about that 22 minutes is, it seems to be a natural attention-span size. When the CD came, the length of a CD expanded to 72 minutes, I found, I really didn't wanna listen for that length of time and, y'know, I think part of what happened and why the LP went away is that people weren't filling top the space in an interesting enough way."] SOUNDCUE (:33 OC: . . . interesting enough way)
We asked Paul Simon what he made of the fact that most reviewers have commented that these days his work focuses on heavier spiritual issues than his earlier work: ["Oh, I don't spend much time thinking about what they think. Y'know, there's a certain obvious — there's something that's certainly obviously true about it. That is an element that's in there, and that seems age-appropriate, actually. That that should be an element. But that's just an added element to all the things I've always been interested in."] SOUNDCUE (:21 OC: . . . been interested in)
The tracklisting to Paul Simon's Seven Psalms is:
"The Lord"
"Love Is Like A Braid"
"My Professional Opinion"
"Your Forgiveness"
"Trail Of Volcanoes"
"The Sacred Harp"
"Wait"
