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 might be 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 engaging in the duty of composing phrases that not solely relate the complicated emotions of grief, however relate their content material with grace.
The report begins and ends with instrumentals, that are exceedingly uncommon throughout Joyner’s discography. Spare acoustic-guitar notes step intentionally by a subject of birdsong, wind and vehicular sounds on the opener, “Crimson-Winged Black Birds (March 13, 2024),” and an exquisitely plucked determine ripples upon a summery drone through 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 advised the listener one thing in regards to the nonlinear inescapability of grief; regardless of how a lot processing you do, you possibly can nonetheless find yourself proper again the place you began.
The eight songs located between these wordless reveries take the listener by the ache, guilt, post-hoc quarterbacking and imagined dialoging with the departed which might be 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 method that may spotlight any music’s unhappiness, he sings these ones with restraint. The small print 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 unhappiness, and “A Damaged Coronary heart Is Greatest Stored Out Of Sight” bridges the mundanity of isolating loneliness so subtly that you simply may miss it. And the title music confesses craving for the absent within the plainest, easiest language.
This austerity is not only linguistic, however musical. The accompaniment offered 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
