A couple of days ago BFSkinner had a diary asking for favorite album choices. I picked Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which is great but perhaps a little obscure.
I want to pick again: I now nominate Paul Simon’s spectacular album The Rhythm of the Saints (1990). Here’s the first song on the album:
Let me add a few more comments about that. As I’ve said here many times, my all-time favorite singer-songwriters are Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen. All are Jewish. All have been deeply involved in Christian beliefs and symbols. Bob Dylan converted to evangelical Christianity for awhile. Leonard Cohen was deeply religious and his writing is drenched with Christian lore and imagery. So then we come to Paul Simon. I think his greatest album The Rhythm of the Saints is absolutely saturated with Christian imagery and expressions from start to finish, especially in the song I’m quoting.
As far as I know he never became a Christian, and I don’t know if he’s now a religious Jew. But this brilliant album is filled with Christian imagery and expressions.
My first wife is a great genius, but she has a blank spot on religion. We saw Paul Simon in concert in 1991, and he sang most of the songs from Rhythm of the Saints. She very belligerently rejected the idea that there was any religious symbolism or imagery in his songs. Not a surprise I divorced her.