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.”

Like many of the octogenarian singers from the ’60s, Simon’s voice has aged. But that’s not a bad thing. His clean, clear tenor has become much more expressive, taking on a weary, almost mournful quality colored by a gentle vibrato, and his cheeky, conversational singing style is now tinged with both wisdom and vulnerability. He sings like a man who is not running away from aging, but, rather, accepts and even embraces it. Simon does, however, still possess remarkable range, something he was never really given credit for back in the heyday of Simon and Garfunkel, when his angelic-voiced partner drew high praise for his harmonies as well as his rare solo turns on songs like “April Come She Will” and, of course, “Bridge over Troubled Water.”

Simon’s return to touring is surprising, given his much-publicized retirement in 2018. At the time, he wrote the decision “feels a little unsettling, a touch exhilarating, and something of a relief.” Five years later Simon announced he had lost virtually all his hearing in his left ear, but he subsequently collaborated with researchers at Stanford University’s Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss program to modify the stage environment that would allow him to return to the concert stage. His current tour began last year, saw a few cancelations due to back pain and then resumed into this year. His final shows are scheduled for mid-July in Highland Park, Ill. [Tickets are available here.]

Watch Simon perform “Graceland” at an earlier stop on the tour

At his San Diego show, Simon and his band came back out after a 20-minute intermission for part two. He had changed into a pair of faded jeans, a black Henley T-shirt under a red long-sleeve overshirt and a cream-colored baseball cap. And for the next hour, he proceeded to entertain with not a parade of chart-topping hits, but, rather, a tastefully curated selection of hits as well as deep cuts representative of his entire career.

Simon began with “Graceland,” from the acclaimed 1986 album of the same name, in which he explored South African isicathamiya and mbaqanga and enlisted male choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo to sing with him. Later in the set, Simon and his band played two more songs from Graceland, the beautifully textured “Under African Skies”—in which Brickell returned to the stage to sing the parallel harmonies originally laid down on the record by Linda Ronstadt—and the buoyant “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” During the latter song Simon directed the spotlight onto fretless bassist Bakithi Kumalo, the only surviving member of the Graceland band.

Related: Our Album Rewind of Graceland

After “Slip Slidin’ Away,” a #5 pop hit in late 1977, and “Trains in the Distance,” from his 1983 solo LP Hearts and Bones, Simon reached back to his early Simon and Garfunkel days for a moving acoustic performance of “Homeward Bound,” the duo’s second single and a huge hit more than 60 years ago.

Watch Simon perform “Homeward Bound” earlier in the tour

It was a mesmerizing moment: singing in a voice that was almost quivering and at times barely above a whisper, Simon appeared lost in the lyrics—and, quite possibly, his own memories. One can only imagine what it’s like to sing a song he wrote in the early days of his career, when he was a rising young star unaccustomed to life on the road and yearning to get back home, “where my love lies waitin’ silently for me.”

If anything, the evening went by too quickly. Simon’s band excelled at the various musical styles that marked the different stages in Simon’s solo career, from the soft-rock lullaby “St. Judy’s Comet” and jazzy “Something So Right,” both from 1973’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, to the infectious Brazilian percussion of “Spirit Voices” and “The Cool, Cool River,” from 1990’s The Rhythm of the Saints.

Simon and crew also performed two more songs from Hearts and Bones, which was originally supposed to be a Simon and Garfunkel reunion LP until Simon scrapped those plans because he felt the songs were too personal. He stripped Art Garfunkel’s vocals that had already been laid down and started afresh.

“The Late, Great Johnny Ace” is a tribute to the late R&B singer who accidentally shot himself to death while playing with a gun; the song evolves into an indictment of gun violence, with Simon referencing the shootings of John F. Kennedy and John Lennon. When he learned of Lennon’s death from a stranger on the street, Simon sang, “the two of us went to his bar and we stayed to close the place, and every song we played was for the late great Johnny Ace.”

Brickell came back out on stage to join Simon for “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard,” from Simon’s second, eponymous solo album, released in 1972. The crowd rose to their feet and never sat back down, even as a hush fell on them when Simon delivered a haunting rendition of the Simon and Garfunkel classic “The Boxer.”

Then, turning to the crowd and asking, “One more?” he performed his final song of the night, “The Sound of Silence.” And the tone of the audience immediately shifted back to the silent reverie of the first part of the show.

The opening line felt personal: “Hello darkness, my old friend—I’ve come to talk with you again.”

Paul Simon: The Quiet Celebration Concert, a nearly two-hour live concert film recorded during the legendary singer-songwriter’s “A Quiet Celebration Tour,” will premiere in the U.S. on Disney+ and Hulu on June 26.