By Daniel Griffiths, Music Radar | Last year Paul Simon returned to music, releasing his album, Seven Psalms. Now comes a new movie, not only documenting the making of that album but charting his extensive career to date.
“The Sound of Silence was the first song I wrote which seemed to come from some place that I didn’t inhabit,” Simon tells The Guardian. “At age 23, it was unusual, well beyond my age and abilities. Then it happened again throughout my writing. Bridge Over Troubled Water was another song that came mysteriously. So did a lot of Graceland. I wrote Slip Slidin’ Away in 20 minutes – usually, it takes me a couple of months to get a song. There are other examples, like Darling Lorraine, of songs that came from someplace else … A mystery, you could call it.”
2018 marked Simon’s last tour with the presumption at the time being that it was the songwriter’s swansong. “I never said I was going to retire,” the 82-year-old Simon now quietly protests. “I said I was going to stop, which I did. I thought that with that band and the repertoire we were doing we’d developed it as far as we could. It was enjoyable, but I wanted to find out what happens when you stop.”
Then, after some travelling with his wife, the singer Edie Brickell, he “had a dream, and everything changed back to a new version of reality,” he explains.
That dream on January 15, 2019, featured a voice that told him: “You are working on a piece called Seven Psalms.” Over the following weeks and months (and as Covid removed options for enlightenment elsewhere) Simon found himself waking with more lyrics that had come to him in dreams.
To document the making of what was quickly becoming Seven Psalms, Simon invited filmmaker Alex Gibney [right in our picture] to document the process – Gibney being the man behind the lens for documentaries on Wikileaks, disgraced cycling star Lance Armstrong and perhaps most famously Going Clear, his expose on Scientology.
The result is In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, a new, three-and-a-half-hour film, out later this month.
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In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon begins a UK cinema run on 13 October – a date which is Simon’s 83rd birthday. The documentary will then be available digitally and on Blu-ray from 28 October.
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Go here to read a lot more about the making of this documentary:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/the-sound-of-silence-came-from-some-place-that-i-didn-t-inhabit-paul-simon-tells-all-in-a-new-documentary/
Photo: Paul Simon | By Adam Nelson | https://www.facebook.com/paulsimon