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

 

Love & Blessings

The first thing we have to deal with is the official title of this track. The album's notes and cover use an '&,' but the website uses "And" (yes, with a capital 'A'). The Lyrics book, meanwhile, uses "and," with the grammatically correct lowercase 'a.' As there is no agreement, I am going with the &; because the album is the original document, and the one most listeners will encounter.

"Love & Blessings" is the last in the triptych of "Love" songs on this album (the others being "Love and Hard Times" and "Love is Eternal Sacred Light.").

The song seems to be about a revivification of an entire country or area. "Love and blessings/ Simple kindness/ Fell like rain on a thirsty land." This image seems to follow that of the second verse of "Boy in the Bubble": "the dry wind" "desert" "dead sand/ Falling." Here, "Fields and gardens.../ Came to life in dust and sand."

Relationships were revived as well: "as if old love was new." And business boomed, too-- along with, not in exploitation of-- this phenomenon: "Banker's pockets overflowing with gold and money."

Then the song shifts to a series of call-and-response phrases. A gospel choir sings "bop-bop-a-whoa," and the speaker replies "Ain't no song like and old song, Charlie," in reference to the fact that this is a sample of a song from 1938, at least (see the Musical Note below).

Who is Charlie? Is it Fat Charlie the Archangel from "Crazy Love, Vol II"? No, Simon uses this name to set up the next line: "Ain't no time like a good time, Charlie." A "good-time Charlie" is a "life-of-the-party" sort of fellow, so this line is a pun.

This, in turn, shifts to "Ain't no times like the good times, Charlie." The good times being, it seems, those filled with "love and blessings," "simple kindness," romance, and full granaries and coffers, all as described above.

Back to "bop-bop-a-whoa," a phrase that proves the link between gospel and doo-wop, two of Simon's favorite genres and ones referred to many times on this album in particular. But here, it seems a shorthand for... something. "Everybody [is] working for" it and one "Can't get enough of" it. But what is it? Money? Sex? Maybe it is different things for different people, the thing that makes them excited.

Tonally, we now shift back to the start of the song, with its imagery of nature and its effects on people. "If the summer kept a secret/ It was heaven's lack of rain." This is ambiguous at best. If it said, "If the summer kept a secret/ it was heaven's rain," then we would assume that the rain was held back, like a secret unspoken, and there was a drought. But "secret... lack of" is double negative of sorts. So... there was little rain, but the heavens didn't tell us about it? I think we would know how much or little rain there was, in any case! We would be the ones who were wet or dry.

From the next lines, it seems that rain was gone... but not missed, at least not by him: "Golden days and amber sunsets/ Let the scientists complain." However, the scientists soon have company in their worried grousing. The autumn leaves were "drained of color." How bad in the drought? "Ghosts in the water beg for more" (and what an evocative image!). Yet, is this true... or is it just that our "memory" was clearer?

The song ends with the speaker being "woken from [his] sleep" by "something." It seems to be the realization that "Love and blessings... [are] ours to hold but not to keep." This echoes Robert Frost's assertion that "nothing gold can stay."

Simon seems to be expressing two related themes, here. One is that the nature of abundance (and scarcity) is cyclical. The other is that people and society change in accordance with these cycles. Abundance brings warmth, which then turns cold when drought sets in. Once we become aware of this, however, we can adjust our behavior, and stay warm toward each other even when times are less kind.

Musical Note:
The "bop-bop-a-whoa" heard in the song is, appropriately for the "bridge" of the song, sampled from The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, specifically, their 1938 song "Golden Gate Gospel Train." (I am unsure whether the group named the song, vice versa, or if both were named for the bridge). It was BB King who pointed Simon to the group, when they met backstage at Madison Square Garden for the 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The song itself was covered by, of all people, Vegas belter Tom Jones.

Next Song: So Beautiful or So What

Changing Opinion

Remember when Philip Glass provided a piece of music to end the song "The Late Great Johnny Ace?" Well, Glass went on to record an album called Songs from Liquid Days. He provided the music for all the tracks, with lyrics by Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne...

...and Simon, whose is the first song on the album.

Glass' form of music is called "minimalism," and Simon's song reflects the idea of doing a lot with a small amount of sound. Because, you see, the song is all about a sound: "Gradually/ We became aware/ Of a hum in the room/ An electrical hum in the room/ It went mmmmm." This "mmmmm" hum is repeated at the end of each verse.

The people in the room try to locate the source of the sound. The even thought the sound may be coming into the room from outside it: "We pressed our ears/ Against the walls... And put our hands on the floor." The sound seemed to almost willfully elude them. It would vary in frequency, and even "seemed/ To disappear" then reappear: "It would roll around the sofa/ A nimbus humming cloud."

As they traverse the room, the seekers offer possibilities to its source. The logical ones guess it might be a "refrigerator." More psychologically inclined think that the voices are in their heads, or memories: "Maybe it’s the hum/ Of our parents’ voices/ Long ago in a soft light... in a dim light."

(The song is available on Simon's website, but only to this point. In the Lyrics book [and on the album], there is more; the song runs onto a second page and concludes as follows:)

"Maybe it's the hum/ Of changing opinion/ Or a foreign language/ In prayer/ Maybe it's the mantra/ Of the walls and wiring/ Deep breathing/ In soft air."

The "foreign language" hypothesis is intriguing-- maybe the sound is merely a hum to us, but interpret-able communication to others. Or maybe the "refrigerator" idea is only half-right, and should be combined with the "foreign language" idea. Maybe the physical entities in the house, the ones with current running through them, are communicating, humming their "mantra" whether we can understand it or not.

But all suggestions of these presume that a sound is actually being, or was, made. By electricity, by people, by something. The suggestions assume that people in the room are hearing, or remembering having heard, sound waves striking their eardrums.

Simon seems to indicate, through the title, that the "hum" is none of these, but the one idea that was not elaborated upon beyond being stated: "Maybe it's the hum/ Of changing opinion."

In other words, when a paradigm shifts in the forest, it does make a "sound." In any case, we all somehow seem to sense it. If we try to pinpoint the source, it will elude us, because it does not come from any one place. It comes from around us, and then resonates within us. It's like that sound we don't hear, then with "a quarter-turn of the head," we do.

"Wait! Just then...! Did you hear that? I thought I heard something... No, I guess not, nevermi... there! There it is again! I think it's coming from over... wait..."

My feeling is that this song led the album because it captured the purpose of the album. The concept of an elusive sound sneaking around us and calling us to play hide-and-seek with it perfectly opens an album meant to introduce the marginalized minimalist genre to the mainstream.

(The song is on YouTube; search for the title and Philip Glass. The track is about 10 minutes long. The vocalist is Bernard Fowler. Paul Dunkel is on flute, and Michael Riesman on piano.)

When Simon won the Gershwin Award from the Library of Congress, there was a concert in his honor (Simon's, not Gershwin's). The last performer was Glass, with a solo piano performance of "Sound of Silence." Well, what other Simon song would a minimalist pick?

Next Song: The Obvious Child