Quiet Celebration Live!
Woke up this morning to see that The Quiet Celebration Live is now available on Apple Music!
Their write-up:
Like Bob Dylan—because who else can you really compare him to? Willie Nelson, maybe?—Paul Simon’s unusual in that he continued to make great, even career-defining music long after his cultural peak. Take 2011’s So Beautiful or So What as one example or 2016’s Stranger to Stranger as another.
Recorded live in Seattle a couple of months before his 84th birthday, The Quiet Celebration Concert is a beautiful, almost elegiac survey of his life’s work. The first section is dedicated to 2023’s song-suite Seven Psalms, the second, longer section to what Simon describes in his brief introductory banter as—with a quiet laugh—“a buncha hits.”
More than a generation or a time period, these songs—“Graceland,” “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War”—describe a feeling: yearning but reserved, melancholy but filled with awe, the small feeling that lingers when the big one fades away. Hearing him play “The Sound of Silence” alone to end the show—and to sound so fully, irretrievably in his old age—is a gift.