It’s rare when the highlight of a legacy artist’s concert is the new stuff, but in the case of Paul Simon’s sold-out June 9, 2026, show at the Rady Shell, San Diego’s gorgeous waterfront concert venue, that’s exactly what transpired.
On his current concert tour, “A Quiet Celebration,” the 84-year-old songwriting legend devotes the first half hour to “Seven Psalms,” a reflective suite of compositions released in 2023 and inspired by a dream as well as the biblical Book of Psalms. His 11-piece backup band was mostly silent as Simon, dressed in a powder blue suit and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, breezed through the seven interlinked passages, joined on the last piece, “The Wait,” by his wife, Edie Brickell.
As the duo sang together, the crowd of nearly 10,000 was oddly reserved, as they had been throughout the performance, listening intently as though transfixed by what they were seeing and hearing.
In Simon and Garfunkel’s signature “The Sound of Silence,” the duo sang about “people hearing without listening.” Sixty years later, under the stars on a warm pre-summer night in San Diego, the audience was clearly doing both, and the spirituality and reflectiveness of that final number seemed to stun everyone into silence as Simon and his wife sang what sounded like a message to his fans—or maybe to the entire universe: “Wait—I’m not ready, I’m just packing my gear. Wait—my hand’s steady, my mind is still clear. I hear the ghost songs I own…through a heartbroken microphone….Heaven is beautiful—it’s almost like home. Children! Get ready! It’s time to come home.”…