Paul Simon - In the Blue Light

The Guardian 80

(Legacy)

As he prepares to mark his retirement from touring with a show in his native Queens, New York, later this month, 76-year-old Paul Simon’s 14th solo album revisits 10 songs from his vast catalogue that he felt were “almost right, or overlooked”, and gives them a treatment he compares to “a new coat of paint on the walls of an old family home”. Other artists such as Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel have tried this approach, and Simon certainly brings his best to it. The stellar band includes jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and guitarist Bill Frissell. Chamber ensemble yMusic’s inventive treatments of Can’t Run But (from The Rhythm of the Saints album) and the sublime René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War (originally on Hearts and Bones) are familiar from Simon’s current Homeward Bound tour. The former song has been updated, so that Simon now hears a DJ whose “sub bass feels like an earthquake”.

There are four selections from the 2000 album You’re the One, which Simon presumably feels is his most overlooked. There are no hits and nothing from Graceland. Generally, sparser arrangements allow more space for Simon’s dazzling imagery and oblique but relevant ruminations on subjects including immigration (René and Georgette …; The Teacher), domestic violence (a bluesier One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor) and the state of humanity and the planet (Questions for the Angels).