SEATTLE — When Paul Simon’s left ear began to fail him in 2023, it did so quietly, which is the particular cruelty of sensorineural hearing loss. He was in the middle of recording Seven Psalms, an album about mortality and faith and the passage of time, when the frequencies started going. By the time the album was finished, he had roughly 6 percent hearing in that ear. He had no idea whether he would perform live again.
The answer arrives on Hulu and Disney+ today. “Paul Simon: The Quiet Celebration Concert,” a two-hour film directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Joel Gallen and recorded live at McCaw Hall in Seattle, premieres across both platforms on June 26 and is the first document of Simon’s return to the stage, including the first-ever live performance of Seven Psalms in its entirety. ABC News reported that a companion live album follows on October 9, available for preorder beginning today as a three-LP vinyl set and a two-CD edition.
The problem Simon confronted was structural. Sensorineural hearing loss, the kind that results from damage to the inner ear or auditory nerve, does not respond the way conductive loss does. It changes not merely the volume of sound but its texture and directionality: the quality that Simon has built his entire creative life around. In a trailer for the film, he described the experience in terms that were uncharacteristically direct: “I had no idea how performing live could be done,” he said. It took him years to play with musicians again.
He found a partial answer through Stanford University’s Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss, which worked with Simon to redesign his stage monitoring setup to compensate for what his left ear could no longer do. The arrangement did not restore what he had lost. What it gave him, as CBS News reported, was a workaround precise enough to let him play. His first tour in seven years, A Quiet Celebration, launched in April 2025, and the McCaw Hall performance filmed for Gallen’s documentary was drawn from that run, the first time Seven Psalms had been delivered in the order Simon wrote it, before a paying audience.
The album itself is not easy listening in any conventional sense. Seven Psalms is a thirty-three-minute piece for acoustic guitar and voice, recorded without a full band, that moves through meditations on faith, doubt, death, and reconciliation. Simon began writing it in his seventies and completed it as his hearing was going, a process that gives the work a biographical weight it was not necessarily designed to carry. The Grammy nomination it received for Best Folk Album acknowledges the recording; the concert film makes the argument for what it means to hear it performed by a man who was not sure he still could. Its closest antecedent in Simon’s catalog is not any of his pop or world-music records. It is the stillness beneath them.
Gallen won his directing Emmy for the 2021 Hulu series McCartney 3,2,1, which stripped the documentary format to a chair, a guitar, and sustained conversation between Paul McCartney and Rick Rubin. The Simon concert film does not replicate that format: this is a stage performance, not an interview, but it shares the commitment to duration and to what a sustained, undiluted engagement with an artist can produce when nothing is cut for time. The two-hour film moves through Seven Psalms in full first, then into a back half that draws from Simon’s solo catalog, deep cuts beside the songs the audience has been carrying for decades. Concert engineer Biff Dawes, a GRAMMY Award winner, shaped how Simon’s acoustic performances translate across a full house.
The October 9 companion album captures the same McCaw Hall performance. It will be released as a three-LP vinyl set and a two-CD edition alongside digital availability across all major streaming services, and preorders open today alongside the film’s streaming premiere. Together, the film and the album constitute the most complete documentation of Simon’s live work in years, and the most direct record of what the Stanford adaptation made possible. What they cannot address is whether the hearing situation that required that adaptation has stabilized or continued to shift in the year since the Seattle concert was filmed.
Simon’s film joins a summer in which platforms have made documented artist legacies some of their most-watched material. Harlan Coben’s Netflix record debut this week demonstrated the scale of what streaming audiences will commit to when they trust the source; separately, HBO is preparing the eight-part JAY-Z docuseries with Rick Rubin for a fall premiere. The Quiet Celebration Concert is a different kind of document than either: not a thriller adaptation and not a biographical interview, but a performance film that asks the viewer to sit with music at the pace the music requires.
What the film cannot settle is what comes next. Simon is 84. He has made a record about mortality, taken it on the road with a modified stage setup, and filmed the result in Seattle for a streaming audience that will number in the millions. The Quiet Celebration Concert is the evidence of what that looked like, and the open sentence at the end of it, the one the film declines to complete.
