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The fitting climax of Harry Styles’ album-launch bash on Friday night: the moment Stevie Nicks came out to join him for a surprise duet on “Landslide.” “It wouldn’t be an album release for me without this young lady,” he told a rapt L.A. Forum crowd who’d already heard him debut the fantastic new Fine Line in its entirety. “I have a feeling that you’re going to enjoy this as much as me. She has been a light for me, and I’m sure she’s been a light for every single one of you. Please welcome to the stage, Miss Stevie Nicks.” Never one to make a shy entrance, the Gold Dust Woman sashayed regally to the microphone on bootheels half Harry’s height, while he raved, “I know—cool, isn’t it?” Their duet was enough to bring down anybody’s mountains, as they held hands and slow-danced. He gazed deep into her eyes to sing the key line, “Can the child in my heart rise above?” The sold-out arena crowd of 18,000 swooned as these two hit their hair-raising harmonies on the final “snoooooow covered hills.”
Harry and Stevie have a long, touching history as everybody’s favorite rock-star friendship. One of the key moments that anointed him as a solo star after the end of One Direction was his 2017 show at Stevie’s old stomping grounds, L.A.’s famous Troubadour, where she joined him to sing “Landslide,’ “The Chain” and “Leather and Lace.” They did “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” last spring when he inducted her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, with the iconic image of Harry dropping to his knees onstage to hand her the trophy. She called him her “love child” in Rolling Stone. (Mick Fleetwood was in the house tonight, so it was a family affair.) She dedicated “Landslide” to him at London’s Wembley Stadium with Fleetwood Mac in June, fondly calling him “my little muse.” But this duet felt special, celebrating their mutual admiration as well as his new Fine Line: the queen welcoming this prince into the pantheon.
Harry’s show was a triumph all the way through, as he leveled a rapturously screamadelic crowd in arena-slaying glam-rock monster mode. Honestly, Having Sex wiped the floor with Feeling Sad, and it wasn’t even close. “Fine Line Live: One Night Only” was a stand-alone gig, four months before he begins his 2020 world tour. He made the night more than a showcase for the new songs; he made it a celebration of this communal pop tribe he has somehow gathered over the years, reveling in his role as a madman master of benevolent mischief. He peacocked in his finery from the album cover, in a salmon-pink shirt, a pearl necklace and high-waisted white sailor pants. Fans had been camping out all week in the Forum’s parking lot, and nobody showed up in a mood to get mellow. To the surprise of absolutely not one single person, the entire audience sang virtually every line of songs that none of them had heard 24 hours earlier. “I’m baaaack,” Harry announced. “I have more than ten songs now.”
He kicked off with “Golden,” playing guitar hero over the surging Seventies-style Malibu harmonies. (His entrance theme was a spoken-word soundbite from the writer Charlies Bukowski: “To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.”) For the first hour, he did all the new tunes, without a dud in the bunch: “Sunflower, Vol. 6,” which seemed like the closest thing to a weak link, turns out to be a gas live. In typical hyperactive starman mode, he twirled, waved, blew kisses, soared in the impossible vocal acrobatics of “Falling.” He seemed amused to note which moments got the biggest responses, especially after “To Be So Lonely,” with its hook, “I’m just an arrogant son of a bitch who can’t admit when he’s sorry.” “I have one question,” he said. “For what reason when I call myself an ‘arrogant son of a bitch,’ is that when you sing the loudest? Did you just decide to sing that one line with your whole chest?”
A surprise highlight came when he did the theatrical Pippin-smitten “Treat People With Kindness,” bringing out the pop duo Lucius to sing the chorus. The floor became a dance-off—in one corner, dozens of girls put all their bags and backpacks in one giant pile, so nobody had to worry where their stuff was, and then danced around the pile in a circle that was really moving to behold, an example of how a Harry Styles concert creates crucial moments of utopian unity and shared euphoria. At one point, he told the audience, “There’s nothing that makes me more hopeful than standing in front of you. Thank you for that. You absolutely changed my life.”
His ace band brought Fine Line’s wide range of emotions to life. “Canyon Moon” accelerated into a buckskin-fringe hippie hoedown that Crosby, Stills and Nash would have shaved their sideburns for. “Cherry” might be the album’s darkest and rawest moment, with its stark confession of jealousy. (“I confess I can tell that you are at your best / I’m selfish so I’m hating it” is really going all the way down.) But it’s also the prettiest, and tonight “Cherry” became a country-rock ballad with Sarah Jones’ drumrolls and plaintive pedal-steel flourishes from guitar wizard Mitch Rowland, who Harry playfully introduced at rehearsals as “Mr. Mysterious!” “Fine Line” ended on a grand note—the six-minute ballad has the introspective vibe of the final scene of Fleabag, as Phoebe Waller-Bridge takes that long slow lonesome walk home.
The night ended with a five-song victory lap, kicking off with “Sign of the Times,” the glam love-and-death piano ballad that began his solo career with a bang, and ending with the cataclysmic rocker “Kiwi,” which got a metallic new Iron Maiden-style intro. He did his slow dance with Stevie Nicks—finally, the rock & roll queen meets a real king who can handle. He busted out another surprise tribute to one of his classic-rock idols: Sir Paul McCartney. For some reason, “Wonderful Christmastime” sounds positively brilliant as a Harry song; a storm of tinsel confetti snow fell on the audience during what felt like several hundred repetitions of that “siiiim-ply haaaaa-ving” chant.
As he declared at the end, “The album is yours. I am yours. I couldn’t ask for a more incredible group of people to play my music for.” (The exit music: Van Morrison’s “Madame George.”) But there was an extra emotional edge to his version of One Direction’s 2011 debut hit, “What Makes You Beautiful,” revamped into a Stones-style rock groove. Harry’s now got more great songs than he can fit into a solo show. He doesn’t need any padding, any songs he doesn’t passionately want to sing. But it means something to him now to revisit “What Makes You Beautiful,” the hit that started him down the ten-year road to the glories of Fine Line.
As he told me this summer, it’s a toast to the shared history between him and his audience. As he told me this summer, “One of my favorite parts of the show always is playing ‘What Makes You Beautiful.’ Always. It’s not like, ‘I’m not playing *those* songs any more, because this is *me* now.’ I’m saying, ‘No, it’s *all* me.’ If there was any song where I should be saying, ‘I don’t know if I can fucking play that one again,’ that would be the one. So it means so much for me to do it and have us all sing it together. It gets more and more meaningful.” Like the rest of the show, this version of “What Makes You Beautiful” was a celebration of the unique bond between this performer and this audience—and a tribute to how far both have evolved over ten weird years.
Set List:
“Golden”
“Watermelon Sugar”
“Adore You”
“Lights Up”
“Cherry”
“Falling”
“To Be So Lonely”
“She”
“Sunflower, Vol. 6”
“Canyon Moon”
“Treat People With Kindness”
“Fine Line”
Encore:
“Sign of the Times”
“Landslide” (with Stevie Nicks)
“What Makes You Beautiful”
“Wonderful Christmastime”
“Kiwi”
LIVE REVIEWS
Here comes rhymin’ Simon. It’s not a phrase we would have imagined saying again, in the context of a concert tour, after Paul Simon wrapped up his official farewell tour seven years ago. There was reason to believe he had valid reasons for marking that as his real goodbye to road shows, and not as the kind of fake-out retirement that so many performers cash in on and then renege on. But he has found solutions to the issues that might have kept him off-stage. By the time he kicked off a five-night stand at Walt Disney Concert Hall this week, Simon was a full 40 shows into his 2025 “Quiet Celebration” outing. And he was sounding… yes, softer (as promised in the tour title!) but, really, undiminished. We’ve never had a better reason to be glad someone went back on their word.
You might look at the “A Quiet Celebration Tour” moniker and ask, as your first question: Well, how much quieter? And the answer is: not terribly much. You shouldn’t mistake this for an all-acoustic tour, although that’s the tone that is taken prior to the show’s intermission, when Simon and his band play back his most recent album, 2023’s “Seven Psalms,” in its front-to-back, suite-style entirety, mostly solemn and without much in the way of tempo or electricity. But then, in the second act and encores, you get 15 catalog selections, including some tunes that count as rabble-rousers by Simon standards. The evening does turns into a party, despite his best intentions to keep it down.
There’s a subtlety to what makes this tour so successful that really does have something to do with volume, or the appearance of it. Simon has as many as 11 players on stage at a time, and during the classics, they’re all playing more or less the same very busy parts they would have played before, on a “Graceland” or a “Cool, Cool River” or even a “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” Yet the arrangements have been calibrated so that the loudest songs seem ever-so-slightly dialed down, almost imperceptibly, to match what might be a little different for the frontman this time around. Any sense of that won’t come as a complete surprise to the audience, because Simon has been open about his hearing issues, stating that only through an elaborate, advanced system of stage monitors has he felt like he could reasonably tour again. There’s also the matter of his voice, which is a little bit softer with age. It’s as if everything has been finely tuned to allow Simon to act his age (which is 83), without doing any kind of stinting on the rich and able-bodied performances.
The performance of “Seven Psalms” is referred to by Simon as “the first half,” although, by actual volume, it’s well under that. It’s safe to guess that most of the audience comes in being unfamiliar with the record, and this is where the booking of fine-arts joints like Disney Hall comes in handy, as even attendees who haven’t come to see the symphony there can still pretty easily intuit that the venue lends itself to a kind of hush and some focused attention skills. The folky “Seven Psalms” exists pretty much at the meditative, impressionistic and spiritual end of his spectrum — with the exception of “My Professional Opinion,” which comes in the middle of the suite and lands with a playful blues feel. It has Simon grappling with the concept of God and exploring unreconciled relationships in the later chapters of life, and it’s not easily graspable on first listen. But maybe the performances on this tour are inspiring a lot more people to check out one of 2023’s most unfairly overlooked albums, one that has exactly the ambition and personal meaning you’d hope for from a great artist who has no desire to go into that good night coasting.
The seven song titles from this album helpfully appeared on an overhead screen as their number came up, to offer an indication of transition without anything as gauche as actually pausing the music for applause. But the album is really more than seven numbers, since the opening song, “The Lord,” gets several unbilled reprises as the suite courses along. That song alone, in its many iterations, counts as a major latter-day Simon work, as he ponders every possible way of looking at the Lord, from shepherd to wrecking ball, incorporating both the most Christian and the most irreverent possible imagery. By the time he’s sung through it all, you won’t exactly know whether the singer is a believer or hardened skeptic, but you’ll know that Simon, the mystical poet and baseball nut, has covered all bases.
His wife, Edie Brickell, came out to guest on the song cycle’s final two parts, “The Sacred Harp” and “Wait,” as she apparently does every night on the tour. She stands on the opposite side of the stage from Simon, to sing her parts, but in musical spirit, at least, they’re as close as the two owls perched together on the “Seven Psalms” album cover. A concept album that starts out being all about God finally ends on something more knowable in this life — the bonding with another human being — and when they sing “Amen” in harmony to end the cycle, it feels like it has to do with Simon facing eternity and with putting a divine seal on his and Brickell’s enduring love affair.
And then the longer second “half” rewards fans for any patience with that opening with a set that hits all the Simon fandom pleasure centers. He hits almost al the obvious greatest hits (albeit no “Bridge Over Troubled Water” or “You Can Call Me Al”) and finds a few deeper cuts (like “St. Judy’s Comet,” a 50-year-old track from “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon” that’d apparently been performed not even a dozen times prior to this tour).
The band got a lot more workout on some of these oldies than on the more minimalist and hypnotic “Seven Psalms” material. The presence of two veteran sidemen in Simon’s cast made for especially memorable and even touching moments. The bass player, Bakithi Kumalo, was introduced as the last surviving member of Simon’s original South African “Graceland” band, and his link to the frontman’s (arguably) most essential era was invaluable with some fleeting signature vocalizations. Meanwhile, Steve Gadd, one of three drummers or percussionists in the ensemble, was back in the fold from the early ’70s to play what could count as pop music’s most famous snare drum part, on the encore of “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” And if that isn’t worth the price of admission…
Horns and strings had their place — mostly the latter, with viola player Caleb Burhans and cellist Eugene Friesen managing to sound like nearly a full Kronos Quartet up there at times. (Friesen’s instrumental entwining with Simon’s acoustic guitar during a stripped-down portion of “Slip Slidin’ Away” was a lovely example.) Nothing was too radically rearranged, although you could notice that “Homeward Bound” had been subtly transformed into more of a country song, between the train-like sound of brushes on drums and Mick Rossi’s lilting piano line.
The screen in this half was used for the occasional photo illustration instead of the previous act’s song titles: If you ever wanted to see the actual photo that inspired “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” there you had it. And “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” which had an unusually expansive spoken intro by Simon, climaxed with the sight of Johnny Ace, JFK and John Lennon side by side on the big screen, each of them with “Johnny Ace” as the caption under his name.
Brickell made a return appearance, entering from the wings to contribute a whistling solo to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” On this song, which served as climax to the main set, it was like the evening had been the concert equivalent of “Benjamin Button” — beginning with Simon in his advanced years looking into the great beyond, and ending with him as a schoolboy.
But the denouement grew somber again, with Simon finally alone on stage with just his acoustic guitar for company, bringing things back to an origin point in a different way with a closing rendition of “The Sound of Silence.” Just as we were all born in dust and to dust we shall return, so it is with silence, maybe for any of us, but especially for a Paul Simon who (along with Garfunkel) had that existential hymn as his fluky first No. 1 smash 60 years ago.
To return to a burning question, or at least one that was on the minds of fans before this tour started: What is the sound of Simon right now — his singing voice, particularly? When he appeared on the “SNL 50” special recently, there was some alarm that he did not sound as youthful as, well, his duet partner Sabrina Carpenter. Or, to give the scoffers more credit, as robust as he did even on his earlier 21st century tours, pre-retirement. The answer to that should be a reassuring one, for anyone who hasn’t yet caught the tour and is thinking about scoring a resale ticket before it’s all over. The best way to describe it is that, for maybe the first 60 seconds of the show, you may be struck by how Simon’s voice sounds a bit more fragile, at this age… and then after that brief period of adjustment, you forget about it. It’s rare to notice many high notes that has been scaled down for age, and you never have to worry about him missing any notes. (And he didn’t sound any worse the wear for just having had the back surgery for acute pain that forced him to cancel a couple earlier shows… the only reference to having been under the knife being an acknowledgement at the top of the show that he’d had “the craziest week.”)
So, in other words, in the best way, he sounds like an 83-year-old choirboy. How fortunate are we to unexpectedly get to share his sanctuary again?
Setlist for Paul Simon at Walt Disney Concert Hall, July 9, 2025:
Set 1: Seven Psalms
“The Lord”
“Love Is Like a Braid”
“My Professional Opinion”
“Your Forgiveness”
“Trail of Volcanoes”
“The Sacred Harp”
“Wait”
Set 2:
“Graceland”
“Slip Slidin’ Away”
“Train in the Distance”
“Homeward Bound”
“The Late Great Johnny Ace”
“St. Judy’s Comet”
“Under African Skies”
“Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War”
“Rewrite”
“Spirit Voices”
“The Cool, Cool River”
“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”
Encores:
“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”
“The Boxer”
“The Sound of Silence”
The remaining dates on Paul Simon’s 2025 tour:
July 12 Disney Hall, Los Angeles, CA
July 14 Disney Hall, Los Angeles, CA
July 16 Disney Hall, Los Angeles, CA
July 19 Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA
July 21 Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA
July 22 Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA
July 25 The Orpheum, Vancouver BC
July 26 The Orpheum, Vancouver BC
July 28 The Orpheum, Vancouver BC
July 31 Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA
August 2 Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA
August 3 Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA
