The Lord

In his first original song on the first Simon & Garfunkel album-- "Bleecker Street"-- Simon refers to the many Psalms that use the imagery of sheep-herding. The "fog," he wrote, "hides the Shepherd from his sheep."

But here, the sheep are abandoning the Shepherd: "Noon and night they leave the flock."

Simon has been writing religious songs, or at least songs that reference religion, all his career, but lately they have been appearing with more frequency.

"The Lord" starts with a reference to, we think, the "Great Migration." a demographic and geographic shift in US history (roughly 1910-70) involving the migration of Blacks from the rural South to the industrial North.

But he does not capitalize the term, so it is another kind of "great migration" that he means. And if it is a religious-- or anti-religious-- one it is not a migration toward somewhere like an Eden or Promised Land, necessarily. It could be to either soft, inviting "meadow grass" or uninviting "jagged rock."

This is what happens when you leave the flock. You gain free will, but the outcome becomes uncertain.

What happens if you stay? The outcome is certain, but you lose free will: "The Lord is my engineer... the earth I ride on." This can be the engineer who steers the train, the electrical engineer who wires the system... or the engineer in the music-studio control room (later, we have "The Lord is my record producer") who determines what the song ends up sounding like, since they control how the sound is recorded and manipulated.

"The Lord... is the path I slip and I slide on," Simon writes, referencing his earlier song "Slip-Slidin' Away." He likely means us to recall its final verse: "God only knows/ God makes His plan/ The information is unavailable to the mortal man/ We... believe we're gliding down the highway/ When in fact, we're slip-slidin' away." 

Yes, he has been wrestling with the free will/determinism issue for decades. 

In the next verse, he sings of astronomical things: comets, stars, night, moons, daylight, and sunset that "now turned the evening rose." Astronomy-- and its earlier form, astrology-- impress upon us that Nature/Fate is the clockmaker, and we are but cogs in the machine.

"The Lord is the face in the atmosphere," he tells us. God is the order and system in the seeming chaos, and the way we, well, interface with it. 

Then he turns to sociological phenomena: tribes, age, "celebrations," songs-- concluding, "the endless river flows." Even if we say, "it's not nature, it's nurture" is that not still a form of determinism? Whether God or society shapes our fate, the end is the same: our fate is shaped for us.

The chorus returns but a new one is added, and now plant imagery is introduced, and a new role for God. The Lord. we are told, is both the forest and the forest "ranger" (personally, I find this a rather forced rhyme with "stranger," but let's work with what we have). More plant imagery arrives soon...

But now we have The Lord as a philanthropist as well. He is a "meal for the... poor," and a "welcome door to the stranger" as well as the one who protects forests from pollution and fires. God takes care of those who cannot care for themselves-- and, in a snide jab at the rest of humanity-- who are also not cared for by those who can afford to do so. 

Aside from forests, we are now shown "flowers" and "seeds." "Tears and flowers/ Dry over time," and what seem important now is not, in the Grand Scheme. "Memory leaves us/ Melody and rhyme," and this has been shown to be true-- those with Alzheimer's, for instance, will remember songs when they have forgotten much else. So are melodies and rhymes but dried-up tears and flowers? 

The plants don't only die, though... they live anew in "seeds": "The seeds we gather/ from the gardener's [or should that be capital-G "Gardener's"] glove/ Live forever. So, songs made by humans are dried flowers in a scrapbook, but things made by God are eternal.

Then comes the last chorus of the song, which blames God for both plague and climate change, and quotes "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." In that hymn, God "loose[s] the fateful lightning/ of His terrible, swift sword." Here, the Lord is the sword! 

In the free will/fate debate, it seems that fate wins, because it is true whether you believe it or not, whether you try to subvert it or not. "The Lord is... a simple truth surviving."

Is... is that the simple truth?

Too soon to tell-- it's not really the last part of the song. The song picks up again after the album's third song... with no new text, ending again with the same verse. 

But then, the continues again after the sixth song. And this time, there is more, new text. And this time, the Lord is less threatening than plagues and natural disasters: "The Lord is a puff of smoke... my personal joke... my reflection." God now, is reduced to... one's thoughts of God. 

Then, at nearly the last second, a third possibility occurs to our thinker: Not us deciding what happens, or God doing so, but random chance! "Are we just trial and error/ One of a billion in the universe?" This thought, however, is waved away. 

And we are right back to "The Lord is my engineer... my record producer."

But now, that fate is at least personal: "The Lord is the music that I hear." This whole time, you have to wonder how such a successful person as Simon could say that everything in his life was predetermined. He's probably been wondering that, himself.

So this is what he lands on. He has, his whole life, followed the music he heard. It has led him around the world. But now he wonders what power presented him with that music, which seemed to materialize just as he was ready to, or needed to, hear it. "The Lord is the music that I hear."

Up to now, this repeated line has been "The Lord is the earth I ride on." Now, after the Lord's being referred to again as an "engineer" in the music studio sense just 5 lines before, we have: "The Lord is my engineer/ The Lord is the train I ride on." [emphasis mine]. So we do have the other meaning of "engineer" acknowledged-- and the idea now is that once we are aboard the train, the track is laid out for us, and we are not even driving.

Then one last image: "The Lord is the coast, and the coast is clear." Let's forgive the pun for now and recall that one of Simon's relatively recent song is titled "The Coast." It would take another post to fully compare the two songs, but here it's enough to note that in that song, the coast is only described as being "injured." Here, "the coast is clear."

And what is The Lord, in the end? "The path I slip and I slide on." We are on a path, and it will take us where it is going, and any effort on our part to wander off it will result in us slipping and sliding... so why not just submit? Get on the train, and enjoy the ride. 

Next Song: Love is Like a Braid

 

Seven Psalms (album), and its instruments

In May of 2023, Paul Simon released a new album titled Seven Psalms.

Structurally, it takes two forms at once. On the one hand, as the title indicates, there are seven distinct songs here, each with its own title. On the liner notes, they are presented as discreet songs.

However, there is only one track on the album-- and Simon has said it is a suite, meant to be listened to all the way through, all at once, as if it were a piece of classical music.

Further, the first song, "The Lord," is used as a motif, and returns a few times throughout the suite-- sometimes with the same lyrics and sometimes with new ones.

Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, each song will be dealt with individually, in its own blog post. All verses of "The Lord," even if they appear further along in the suite, will be considered part of that song, for the sake of analyzing its lyrics. 

Next Song: The Lord

MUSICAL NOTES:

Over the course of this blog, when an unfamiliar instrument was employed on a given track, I mentioned it.

Here, however, the liner notes don't specify which track used which instrument, so I will list and explain them now.

The more unfamiliar ones-- and all of these are acoustic-- include:

The gamelan: This is less one instrument than a set of them, from Indonesia, that includes mostly percussion but also some winds and strings.

The gopichand: A one-string instrument from Southeast Asia. It is shaped like a tall isosceles triangle, with a hollow gourd as the base.  

Cloud-chamber bowls: This is an array of large, glass half-bottles, designed by Harry Parch. Both their top halves and inverted bottom halves are arranged on a frame and struck, as with chime-style bells. (The bottles were originally designed for physics experiments involving radiation, in what scientists call "cloud chambers.")

[Note: More about Parch on the Musical Note section of the "Insomniac's Lullaby" entry.]

The Chromelodeon: An adapted reed organ that plays a 43-tone-per-octave scale. Another Parch invention. As the name implies, it is a variation on the melodeon, which is a reed instrument played with keys, that looks like a piano and sounds something like an accordion. 

The hadphoon: A toned percussion instrument made from metal. Sort of a circular marimba, or flat steelpan, it is placed on top a drumhead, and its metal tines (each a different width, and therefore a different tone) are struck.

The hadjira: A large, tambourine-like frame drum.

The gran cassa bass drum: Similar to the largest drum one might see in a marching band.

Almglocken: The liner notes explains these are "Swiss tuned bells." They are metal, with handles on top and no clappers inside. They have been compared to cowbells but are more bell-like in sound; they "dong" rather than "clunk."

The Chalumeau: a Baroque reed instrument considered an early form of the clarinet.

The therobo: This is to the lute what a bass guitar is to a guitar. It has a rounded back and a very long neck.