Perhaps the best way to link the two Paul Simon film festival events, a Friday-night screening of Alex Gibney's documentary "In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon" and Saturday morning's Conversation With Paul Simon, is to quote the songwriter himself. "It's about as close as somebody has come to capturing the creative process that is my creative process," he said of the film, during the "conversation" with Dave Fear, Rolling Stone's film editor, at East Hampton Middle School.
At the screening, Mr. Gibney discussed the genesis of the film. "Paul had seen a film I had done about Frank Sinatra, and he had liked it a lot and wondered if there might be a film about his life and career. Of course I was delighted and thrilled to get the call . . . The film itself really took off when Paul called me one day and said he was making this new album called 'Seven Psalms.' That gave us the structure for this film."
The "Seven Psalms" sessions were shot in Mr. Simon's recording studio in the Texas Hill Country, where he lives several months a year with his wife, Edie Brickell, the singer and a Texas native. Throughout those sessions, and in his talk with Mr. Fear, Mr. Simon was unfailingly gracious, thoughtful, and serious about his work but not himself.
Of those film sessions, Mr. Simon said, "I think I had finished all the writing . . . but I hadn't done the recording, or I was in the process of doing the recording. During the recordings there are really two or three elements that are going on. One, of course, is the song and the lyric." There is also a "textural background that contextualizes my guitar. Those sounds and instruments are very interesting."
Mr. Simon went on to discuss "cloud bowls," instruments invented by Harry Partch, a 20th-century American composer. Partch believed that an octave can be divided into 43 unequal tones, or microtones, and he had to invent instruments that could play microtonally. Years ago, Mr. Simon recorded some of Partch's cloud bowls, which are shaped like huge wine glasses.
The cloud bowl's tones are "scattered throughout the 'Seven Psalms,' " said Mr. Simon, "as are a myriad of different bells, most of them from India. What I did with that was to take tonalities that came out of the guitar and amplify certain tonalities with the bells or the cloud bowls or some orchestral glockenspiel. I hope that produced an effect of depth."
As Mr. Gibney said, "His ability to listen to other things and to integrate it with what he wants to say, that's what I was so amazed by. I got something really special out of watching and listening to Paul listening."
Talking about the "soundscape" of the new album, Mr. Simon referred to the microtonalities produced by the other instruments as "going on in the background conversation. In the foreground is the guitar parts, which I would write in the same way I’ve always written guitar parts, just by improvising and editing, and then finally comes the melody, and then last comes lyric. That’s the process of songwriting for me."
Mr. Gibney's three-and-a-half-hour film -- the filmmaker concluded his introduction to it by advising the audience to "feel free to take bathroom breaks" -- covers Mr. Simon's career from its beginnings in Queens, where as teenagers he and Art Garfunkel teamed up, calling themselves Tom and Jerry, to the present.
During the interview, Mr. Simon touched on many key periods of his development. Early on he had been writing rock-and-roll songs and playing the electric guitar. "The Sounds of Silence" was preceded by his switch to acoustic guitar.
In 1964 he moved to London, where he mastered finger-picking. His songwriting, he said, was influenced by Bob Dylan, but musically, "it was influenced by a whole bunch of English folk musicians not so familiar to Americans. That's how I started to write the kind of music" exemplified by such songs as "I Am a Rock" and "Homeward Bound," which he wrote in London.
"The Sounds of Silence" was released in 1964 in an acoustic version, on the Simon and Garfunkel album "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." The album itself was a flop, but by the time Mr. Simon returned to New York in 1965, Tom Wilson, an engineer at Columbia Records, had overdubbed the acoustic version with rock instrumentation by the studio musicians who'd played on Mr. Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." The revised version went to number one and launched the duo into the music stratosphere.
Mr. Simon wanted to correct the record about the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. "It wasn’t only that we played there. We were not acknowledged, but we started it. This idea originated in John Phillips’s kitchen." Phillips (who was with the band the Mamas and the Papas), Mr. Garfunkel, Lou Adler, and Mr. Simon put the idea in motion, and the rest is history.
Because "the acts in San Francisco loathed the Los Angeles acts," Simon and Garfunkel were sent to the Bay Area to convince the Grateful Dead to perform.
"The Dead were sweet people," said Mr. Simon. "From a distance they seemed a little bit intimidating to me. But they were nice and they wanted to do the festival. That would have been their great exposure to the American public, but unfortunately they were squeezed in between Jimi Hendrix, who set his guitar on fire, and the Who, who smashed their instruments. So the Grateful Dead sort of paled in comparison."
It's no surprise that the launch of Mr. Simon's solo career is central to both the film and the talk. The watershed was the making of the album "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Because Mr. Garfunkel was in Mexico filming "Catch-22" with Mike Nichols, "he'd be away for long periods of time, so it interrupted the groove of making an album." Mr. Simon added that they didn't have the same taste in music and that they were no longer in sync the way they had been until then.
"As I've said many times before, duos don't last. Bob and Phil Everly, Nichols and May, Paul and John. We lasted for five years, which is about as long as the Beatles lasted." Even without Mr. Garfunkel's flirtation with the movies, "it would have broken up anyway."
A highlight of the conversation came when Mr. Fear followed a question with "I wish we had a guitar out here."
"I have my guitar," Mr. Simon said and, to the audience's delight, the instrument was brought out. He played a few chords, remarking that "I used to write a lot of songs that had little guitar hooks at the beginning," and then played a few notes from "I Am a Rock" and the opening of "The Sound of Silence." The room erupted.
When Mr. Fear asked about the singer's 2018 "retirement," he replied, "I never said I was retiring. What I thought at the time was, I’m going to stop performing -- particularly, I was going to stop performing the show that I'd been touring with, which was maybe the most satisfying tour I had, musically. The reason that I wanted to stop performing it was that I really thought we had developed, or rethought, the arrangements of the songs to as great a degree as I could think of, and to continue would be just to invite some kind of gilding-the-lily process."
"And as far as writing goes, I thought I could write another album and it would be as good as the last couple of albums I did, which I thought were as good as I could do, but I thought I won’t get it any better." He decided to "simply stop and begin again, and see what that would be."
"Seven Psalms," his first new album since 2018, marks that new beginning. In a trailer for the album, Mr. Simon says that the idea came to him in a dream, and after that he’d wake up between 3:30 and 5 a.m. two or three nights a week and the lyrics would come to him. Mr. Gibney called "Seven Psalms" "a meditation on mortality and belief."
As of mid-September, when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, "In Restless Dreams" did not have a theatrical distributor, perhaps because of its running time. But "an epic examination of the work of one of the best songwriters in history" (rogerebert.com) is sure to surface, either on the big screen or perhaps as a streaming mini-series.
