![]() It starts off by alluding to the decreasing importance of religion to younger generations: “I’ve been thinking about the great migration / Noon and night they leave the flock,” he points out at the album’s outset. The opening song, “The Lord,” which has a chorus that’ll come up a few more times before the album is over, directly harks back again and again to the most famous biblical psalm - the Lord-is-my-shepherd one - with some nearly comical twists. Religion, as either myth or reality, is especially on his mind. One guess for whom they’re rockin’ and tollin’? Death is a constant theme here, although any statement he has to make about it is posed as a series of questions in these sometimes elliptical, sometimes plain-spoken lyrics. That’s meant in the most positive possible way, given how much meat Simon gives listeners to chew on in a single-course dinner. At 33 minutes, it almost counts as an EP by modern standards, but it feels more like three hours. It’s an odd but understandable move: Nobody is going to be trying hard to get a track from an album dipping into The End of All Things onto radio, even the adult alternative format, and the album really does benefit from being understood as a whole. And, hey, didn’t the original psalmist, the biblical David, break his album up into singles?) ![]() ![]() (Prince tried that album-as-a-single-track gambit, once, with “Lovesexy,” but even that record got broken up into individual listens in the streaming era. On the most basic level, the extent to which the singer-songwriter wants you to experience it as a concept album is underscored by the fact that its seven distinct songs - plus two unbilled reprises - are being released digitally as one long track. “Seven Psalms” is unlike any other Simon album in almost too many ways to list. ![]()
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