Paul Simon has hinted at a return to live performance, despite quitting touring in 2018 and losing the hearing in his left ear during the recording of 2023 album Seven Psalms.
Speaking to the Guardian in a new interview, the 82-year-old singer-songwriter said: “I’m hoping to eventually be able to do a full-length concert. I’m optimistic. Six months ago I was pessimistic.”
Announcing his final tour in 2018, Simon called it “an act of courage to let go. I’ve often wondered what it would feel like to reach the point where I’d consider bringing my performing career to a natural end. Now I know: it feels a little unsettling, a touch exhilarating and something of a relief.”
His final tour performance was at his childhood home of Queens, New York, in September 2018, followed by a handful of one-off sets in 2019. “The farewell tour was basically just to bump the prices,” he joked to Stephen Colbert that year. He added: “I don’t intend to tour any more, but I will perform again, and the monies that I make I’m going to donate to various causes I believe in.”
But the only major appearance since 2019 has been for the star-studded Grammy tribute concert to him in 2022, entitled Homeward Bound, and a short appearance at that year’s Newport folk festival.
As he recorded Seven Psalms, an album partly informed by a series of dreams, he began experiencing hearing loss. “It was scary, frustrating,” Simon says in his Guardian interview. “You’re in denial and then you’re overwhelmed by this change in your life because you now have a disability.”
In July, he told Mojo magazine: “I haven’t figured out how to perform with the hearing loss. I’ve tried to rehearse with the guys in my touring band, to see if I could manage it. I can’t so far.”
But he made a tentative return to live performance in September, performing seven acoustic songs at an invite-only charity fundraiser in a New York loft to an audience of 150. The set list featured Mrs Robinson, Slip Sliding Away, Mother and Child Reunion, Homeward Bound, The Boxer, The Sound of Silence and Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, with New York Yankees baseball star Bernie Williams joining to perform the whistling solo on the latter track.
Simon is currently promoting In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, a documentary directed by Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney, which is being shown in UK cinemas on 13 October: Simon’s 83rd birthday.
