I thought I’d never see Paul Simon perform live. In 2018, he announced his retirement after his last tour, which stopped at Capitol One Arena. But retirement in entertainment — be it musicians, actors, or pro wrestlers — is often fleeting. The muse driving their achievements is a relentless beast, and many find it hard to quit. Paul returned to the road this year with his band for the first time since Covid. On June 4, he played the first of three nights at Wolf Trap as part his A Quiet Celebration Tour.
I grew up on Simon, whose musical career goes to the 1950s, when he started writing and recording songs as a teenager. Simon & Garfunkel songs played regularly on the Cleveland Oldies station my parents played in the car, and I inherited my mother’s copy of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme.
Many figures from the ’50s and ’60s faded over time, but Simon remains a vital presence in popular culture. Splitting with Art Garfunkel, he achieved commercial and critical success as a solo artist in the ’70s. He reinvented himself in the ’80s, incorporating African music on Graceland. A lifelong resident of New York, he performed “The Boxer” on Saturday Night Live after 9/11.
Widely considered one of the greatest songwriters, Simon has written standards and classics, which he revisited in his second set. The evening began with a performance of Seven Psalms, his latest album, a 33-minute suite of songs meditating on mortality and spirituality meant to be experienced as a continuous whole. The piece came together in a series of writing sessions after Simon woke up from a dream in the middle of the night. For the last two segments, “The Sacred Harp” and “Wait,” his wife of three decades, Edie Brickell (of Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians), sang with him.
Watch a trailer for Seven Psalms by Paul Simon on YouTube:
Simon came out of the gate hot for his second set with the title track of Graceland, so named for Elvis’s home in Memphis. “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” he explained, “came directly from an adolescent memory” of hearing on the radio about the R&B singer’s death in 1954 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the result of playing Russian roulette after performing in Houston. Simon says it was “the first violent death I remember.” Ace’s death inspired at least one other song, Dave Alvin’s “Johnny Ace Is Dead.” (I’m not sure, but it might’ve inspired the name of a pro wrestler, too.) During the song, the screen behind the band displayed photos of Ace, JFK, and John Lennon, all referenced in the song, all killed by guns.
Edie Brickell sang again on “Under African Skies,” which Paul wrote for the late Joseph Shabalala, founder of the South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. His songs come from disparate sources: A boat trip down the Amazon River inspired “Spirit Voices,” which appeared on The Rhythm of the Saints, as did “The Cool, Cool River.” Simon lifted the title of “Rene & Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War” (WWII) from a caption of a photo of the French surrealist painter he saw in a book.
While the second set included hits like “Slip Slidin’ Away,” “Homeward Bound,” and “Me & Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” Paul and his band also played deeper cuts, like “St. Judy’s Comet,” “Train in the Distance,” and “Rewrite.” He saved “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” and “The Boxer” for his first encore, then returned for a second to play “The Sound of Silence.”
Given the constraints of time and his decision to play some lesser-known songs, he had to leave out many of his most beloved tunes, like “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “America,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “American Tune,” and “You Can Call Me Al.” To be fair, even if he’d stuck to his biggest hits, he would’ve had to make omissions: There are simply too many great songs in his catalog for any one concert.
Simon’s band was great: talented players who kept it subtle and light in keeping with the evening’s theme. The star of the evening, of course, was the remarkable songs Paul Simon has been giving us for so long.
Here are some photos of Paul Simon performing live at Wolf Trap on June 4, 2025. All pictures copyright and courtesy of David LaMason.
