Songfacts®:

• Seven Psalms explores Paul Simon's spiritual journey through songs that resemble ancient folk tales. The idea for the record came to him in a dream, and two to three nights a week he would wake up in the early hours to write lyrics for the project.
  
  The opening track, "The Lord," is a long and reflective monologue. "The Lord is a terrible swift sword," he tells us, suggesting an Old Testament understanding of the Almighty.
• Simon programmed the album like a trip, a single half-hour piece. "The record his 33 minutes long, purposely," he told Mojo magazine. "Thirty three is a very big number in Christianity (Jesus' age when he was crucified; the number of times God's name appears in the creation story in the Book of Genesis) and it's the LP speed. All of that is designed."
  
  "While I was doing this, I would think, Yeah, I believe that. I'll stand by that statement," Simon continued. "Now, is it really true? Like, 'I lived a life of pleasant sorrows. Until the real deal came along.'(love is like a braid)? Other times, something like, 'the Lord is my engineer' ("The Lord") – yeah, engineer having a lot of meanings. Even as a half joke, recording."
• Seven Psalms opens like a call to worship with the soft gong-like sound of the Cloud-Chamber Bowls, invented by Harry Partch.
  
  Harry Partch (1901-1974) left an indelible mark on the world of music as a composer, theorist, instrument builder, and writer. To play his music, Partch invented an entire family of one-of-a-kind instruments. Simon first played Partch's Cloud-Chamber Bowls on the Stranger to Strange track "Insomniac's Lullaby."
  
  "When I wrote 'Insomniac's Lullaby,' I went to this school in New Jersey, Montclair State, where quite a few of his instruments were being kept," Simon told Mojo. "I sampled all of the Cloud Bowls – individual notes, clusters. I used some of them on that song. And we floated these things across the tracks on Seven Psalms, just in an aleatory way to hear what worked. 'That's good, keep it right there." 'No, that's clutter.' The tracks put you in this trance, a place where what I was saying lyrically had a chance to be received in the right context."