Not all the things that Simon Joyner sings is autobiographical, however it’s all the time true. The Omaha-based singer and guitarist has spent the final 30 years setting the songwriting bar frightfully excessive. The characters in his songs recount the ways in which life modifications you, typically knowingly and different instances with uninsightful candor. But when these written figures don’t all the time know what they’re saying, Joyner does; he’s a grasp at drawing portraits which are concurrently longform and boiled down. So, when he confronted the duty of writing after the dying of his son Owen, he didn’t let the daunting enormity of the subject deter him from conducting the duty of composing phrases that not solely relate the advanced emotions of grief, however relate their content material with grace.
The document begins and ends with instrumentals, that are exceedingly uncommon throughout Joyner’s discography. Spare acoustic-guitar notes step intentionally by way of a area of birdsong, wind and vehicular sounds on the opener, “Purple-Winged Black Birds (March 13, 2024),” and an exquisitely plucked determine ripples upon a summery drone throughout the nearer, “Cicada Tune (Late August 2022).” The latter was recorded in the identical month that Owen died. With out expending a single phrase, Joyner has already instructed the listener one thing concerning the nonlinear inescapability of grief; irrespective of how a lot processing you do, you’ll be able to nonetheless find yourself proper again the place you began.
The eight songs located between these wordless reveries take the listener by way of the ache, guilt, post-hoc quarterbacking and imagined dialoging with the departed which are all a part of grief. It isn’t straightforward going, however it’s by no means oversold. Whereas Joyner’s voice naturally cracks in a means that may spotlight any music’s disappointment, he sings these ones with restraint. The main points don’t want depth to seize maintain of you. The climate metaphors embedded in “The Silver Birch” set you bobbing on a stream of inescapable disappointment, and “A Damaged Coronary heart Is Finest Stored Out Of Sight” bridges the mundanity of isolating loneliness so subtly that you just would possibly miss it. And the title music confesses craving for the absent within the plainest, easiest language.
This austerity isn’t just linguistic, however musical. The accompaniment supplied by longtime foil Michael Krassner and a handful of Omaha musicians is spare however important. Something extra could be a distraction. [Grapefruit/BB*Island]
—Invoice Meyer
