Spiritual Stranger

Although Paul Simon turned 74 last October, his new album, Stranger to Stranger (Concord), confirms he’s as committed as ever to finding new ways of exploring his favorite motifs. It’s a process he describes in the title track as “working the same piece of clay, / day after day, / year after year.” “Reconstruction,” he concludes, “is a lonesome art.”

The lonesomeness of the art notwithstanding, Simon brings a humor to his reconstructions that, along with his mischievously boyish voice, allows him to confront serious realities without seeming morbid or maudlin.

For the second album in a row, for instance, he includes a comic song based on the fear of not getting into heaven. In “The Afterlife” (from 2011’s So Beautiful or So What), a newly deceased Everyman discovers that he must fill out a form and wait in line. In Stranger to Stranger’s “Wristband,” a musician gets locked out of the club that he’s headlining and has to produce proof of his having paid the admission price to get back in.

And, also for the second album in a row, Simon leavens a meditation on love with references to Christmas. “Silent night, / still as prayer,” he sings in “Proof of Love,” “darkness fills with light. / Love on Earth is everywhere.” The song’s two refrains—“I trade my tears / to ask the Lord / for proof of love” and “Amen, Amen”—underscore Simon’s need to believe in the sacred even if it takes Christian shapes not obviously compatible with the Judaism into which he was born.

But “Proof of Love” and “Wristband” reinvigorate more than Simon’s sense of the ironic. They also reinvigorate his interest in experimental musical textures and in using them to echo the quirkiness of his words and melodies. Stranger to Stranger’s credits identify over 30 supporting vocalists and musicians, the latter of whom play everything from electronic drums, conga drums, and maracas to marimbas (two kinds), mbiras (ditto), and the zoomoozophone. Not surprisingly, rhythms more than melodies drive the songs.

As for the aforementioned “Christian shapes,” they’ve been appearing in Simon’s work as far back as his 1973-1974 world tour, when The Jessy Dixon Singers sang Dixon’s “What Do You Call Him” and Andraé Crouch’s “Jesus Is the Answer.” Six years later, on the soundtrack to his film One-Trick Pony, Simon sang, “Some people say Jesus, that’s the ace in the hole, / but I never met the man, so I don’t really know.”

To the extent that Simon has waxed spiritual in his subsequent albums, he has often seemed like someone pressing his nose to the glass through which another famous Paul once wrote that we “see darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). But seeing darkly beats not seeing at all. And on Stranger to Stranger’s “Insomniac’s Lullaby” (a prayer) and “Street Angel” (about a homeless man), what Simon sees includes the possibilities that resting in peace is related to the forgiveness of sin and that God is a fisher of men respectively.

The most ambitious song is the dramatic monologue “Cool Papa Bell.” Sung from the point of view of a real-life Negro-baseball-leagues star as famous for his clean living and clean mouth as for his speed, it uses profanity to express the ugliness of profanity, astronomical metaphors to express the hope for universal salvation, and the thrill of momentum to express the joy of living in the moment.

In 1968, Simon took the musical question “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” to the top of the charts. Nearly 50 years on, it’s déjà vu all over again.