Paul Simon is bringing his A Quiet Celebration tour to Bethel Woods on Friday, July 3, 2026 — and the songs are the whole point. Each night opens with Seven Psalms, his 2023 song cycle, performed start to finish as one continuous 33-minute piece; after intermission, Simon and his band reach back across six decades of one of the most singular catalogs in American music. On the eve of Independence Day, on the grounds of the original 1969 Woodstock festival, those songs are going to land differently than they would anywhere else.
About Paul Simon
Few songwriters in the history of popular music have operated at Simon’s level for as long as he has. He’s a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee — once as half of Simon & Garfunkel, and again in 2001 as a solo artist. He has won 16 Grammy Awards, including three for Album of the Year: Bridge Over Troubled Water, Still Crazy After All These Years, and the landmark Graceland. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2002 and was the inaugural recipient of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. His writing pulls from folk, gospel, jazz, and the South African and Latin traditions he helped carry to a mass audience — a body of work genuinely without peer.
This tour marks his return to the road after more than half a decade away. It’s not a greatest-hits victory lap so much as a working artist still chasing the song, pairing that meditative new cycle with the hits that built the legend.
The Venue
Bethel Woods Center for the Arts sits on the actual field where Woodstock happened in 1969 — arguably the most historically loaded ground in American music. The on-site museum alone is worth the trip up. But the Pavilion and its sloping lawn are the draw on a show night: a setting that feels both vast and weirdly close, the kind of room where a hushed song carries all the way to the back. For a writer like Simon, whose quietest moments are often his best, it’s close to ideal.
Tickets & Details
Paul Simon plays Bethel Woods on Friday, July 3, 2026 at 8:00 PM. Tickets are on sale now. Get tickets here.
You don’t have to be a lifelong Simon obsessive to know this one matters. The songwriting sits on another plane, the players he tours with are always world-class, and hearing those songs outdoors as the sun drops behind the Sullivan County hills — the night before the Fourth, on the Woodstock site — is the kind of evening you carry around for years. Get there. Explore more shows across the Hudson Valley.