The Sound of Something New
As a girl from New York City, Paul Simon’s music loomed large in my life. My late father, a pastor, rarely listened to “secular” music, but he would play “The Sound of Silence” on our living room piano. He had grown up and come to faith while living in tenement apartments in the Lower East Side and Yorkville neighborhoods of Manhattan, and he resonated with the lyric: “and the sign said, ‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls, and whispered in the sounds of silence.’”
Paul Simon performing in 1975
I started listening to Simon and Garfunkel in high school, and their greatest hits album became part of the soundtrack to my summer of 1997. Cecilia still gets played regularly on car trips. Later, when I attended Queens College (CUNY), I took pride in knowing Paul Simon had graduated from the school (along with Jerry Seinfeld and Ray Romano– go Knights!).
After years of listening to his music, getting to see Paul Simon live was a long-standing bucket-list item. I had the chance when some of the Clapham staff and affiliates attended his “Quiet Celebration” show at Wolf Trap in Northern Virginia. The first set exclusively featured Simon’s beautiful spiritual meditation, Seven Psalms. The songs were intricate and meditative, revealing Simon’s own journey of seeking the Divine. After intermission, he returned to the stage to play a number of his greatest hits, beginning with “Graceland" and ending, finally, with a solo version of “The Sound of Silence.”
Both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles contain scriptures proclaiming God is doing a “new thing” in the world. New things are exciting. They are also scary. The exhortation to “sing a new song” appears in several Psalms (33, 96, 98, and 149), and in Isaiah 42. As Simon sang his “new” songs, I reflected on how many people–including myself–were there to hear his old, familiar songs. Singing “lie lie lie” during “The Boxer” with hundreds of others is a powerful experience. Sitting quietly with hundreds of people to listen to unfamiliar lyrics is uncomfortable. For so many of us in life, we like the known, the comfortable, the “songs” that take us back to different points in our lives. It is hard to sing new songs when you’re unsure of the melodies or harmonies, and don’t yet know the lyrics. We don’t have a frame of reference for those new songs–at least not yet.
Even so, there are times when the old songs, while providing bridges to the past, no longer resonate the way they once did. When Simon sang “The Sound of Silence” without Art Garfunkel’s haunting harmonies, it felt stripped down and bare; Simon’s voice not what it once was. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear Paul Simon perform what is arguably his most famous song. But it wasn’t what it would have been like to hear it when he was a younger man, singing alongside his childhood friend. It was clear that Simon was giving his fans what they wanted (to be clear: I absolutely wanted to hear him sing “The Sound of Silence.”) But it was also clear Simon’s heart was in his new songs.
I don’t know if, years from now, “The Lord” (the opening track of Seven Psalms) will end up on a teenage girl’s summer soundtrack. But I hope Simon’s new songs will one day become as familiar, comfortable, and nostalgic as his old ones.
