The night opens in near-silence: Seven Psalms, Paul Simon’s 33-minute acoustic suite, played start to finish with no breaks before a single familiar chord arrives. That is the architecture of A Quiet Celebration, the tour Simon extended into 2026 — the full suite first, an intermission, then a long second half of reimagined classics and rarely-played deep cuts pulled from six decades of songwriting. At 84, he is finally making his Tanglewood debut.
This is the second of two nights, and the second night exists only because demand for the first forced Tanglewood to add it to the Popular Artist Series. Sunday, June 28, with a 6:00 PM start at the Koussevitzky Music Shed in Lenox, Massachusetts — ninety minutes earlier than Saturday’s 7:30 PM curtain, worth knowing if you are building an evening around it. An outdoor shed in the Berkshires at 6:00 PM in late June means the light is still high when the music begins, and the sun will be dropping behind the treeline somewhere in the second set.
Simon does not tour often, and he does not assemble a band like this casually. The ensemble carrying these arrangements is an 11-piece outfit anchored by vocalist Edie Brickell, guitarist Mark Stewart, and the great Steve Gadd on drums — the drummer whose fingerprints are all over Simon’s catalog going back decades.
You do not need a long introduction to the man. Across six decades he built one of the most consequential bodies of work in American popular music — first alongside Art Garfunkel, then through a solo run that kept rewriting its own rules. Graceland (1986) is the landmark, but the catalog stretches from Bridge Over Troubled Water all the way to Seven Psalms. He holds 16 Grammy Awards, three of them for Album of the Year. In 2007 the Library of Congress named him the inaugural recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. He is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice — once with Garfunkel, once on his own.
Tanglewood is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a forested hillside campus where the Koussevitzky Music Shed seats roughly 5,700 under cover and the lawn rolls out well past it for those who’d rather sit under open sky. For a show built on quiet — a suite you’re meant to hear in full before anything else — the shed is where that intention lands. Get there before the lights go down.
Some shows you catch because the timing is convenient. This is not one of those. Buy Tickets