Artist: Paul Simon

Title: So Beautiful or So What

Label: Hear Music

Last December on The Colbert Report when Paul Simon sneak previewed his spiritually charged single "Getting Ready for Christmas Day," satirist Stephen Colbert asked, "Is this your way of letting people know you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?" After the laughter, Simon said, "That's to be revealed later."

What seemed then like a safe answer either way for the Comedy Central audience looks now to be the gospel truth according to So Beautiful or So What, a tremendous new album from the one so many have rightly called pop music's poet laureate. Indeed, the 69-year-old legend writes with exceptional precision, wit, and grace about mortality, God, and love more vividly than ever here, but he still appears unsure of where it all leads.

The rootsy "Christmas Day" is a good example—a rhythmically stimulating, pointed look at workaday blues, complicated wars, and the longing for simpler times, all spliced together with samples from a foreboding 1941 sermon by Reverend J. M. Gates who warns, "When Christmas come, nobody knows where you'll be." Far lighter is "The Afterlife," a tidy, pulsating sing-along where Simon learns eternity has its own share of long lines, forms to fill out, and women to reject his advances. He says meeting God feels "like you're swimming in an ocean of love and the current is strong," but that communicating with Him even then is somehow difficult.

"Love and Hard Times" is a gorgeous yet challenging classical ballad in which the Father and Son "paid a courtesy call on Earth one Sunday morning" but don't stay long because, "These people are slobs." That jarring thought is beautifully tempered when the narrator realizes God is to thank for the true love of his life. And later, the Creator laments how people don't get His sense of humor on "Love Is Eternal Sacred Light," a steam train of a song featuring background vocals from bluegrass favorites Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver.

The Gershwin-like "Questions for the Angels" finds Simon confessing, "Who believes in angels? I do." But he continues wrestling with life's bigger picture on the Louisiana-influenced closing title track, wondering, "Will it have a happy ending? Maybe yeah, maybe not. Life is what you make of it; so beautiful or so what." Judging by this masterful work—a rich, seamless blend of Simon's melodic gifts, American identity, and world music accents—it's a thing of beauty.

*This review first published 4/21/2011