SIMON JOYNER
Sad, subline smarts via Nebraska
Interview by Brett Abrahamsen
(April 2025)
Simon Joyner's absence from the pantheon of melancholy singer-songwriters is a glaring injustice. He combines the religious solemnity of Leonard Cohen, the literary daring of Bob Dylan, the weirdness of Neil Young, and the sadness of Townes Van Zandt to form a sublime sense of disillusionment. He's been active for several decades now, and he's written dozens of fantastic songs. He's also prone to risk taking and experimentation, which has frequently yielded fascinating results.
His early work, however, is nothing to write home about. The talent is there, but the albums are monotonous and one dimensional. The story really begins with Songs For The New Year (1996), a bleak and world weary collection that marked a quantum leap over his previous output. This was followed by his masterpiece, Yesterday Tomorrow And In Between (1998). The songs are astonishingly well written, and the arrangements are subtle but intense. "Ballad In The Past," "Christine," "Eight Verses" and the title track are required listening for any fan of Dylan, Cohen, or Van Zandt. Subsequent albums didn't reach the same heights, but he was still capable of writing great songs: "Fools Gold on Main St.," "Dreams of St. Teresa," "The Only Living Boy In Omaha" and so forth. Then, he reinvented himself: the album Ghosts (2012) contains excellent songs in the old style ("Red Bandana Blues") but also cuts like "Vertigo" which recall Lou Reed at his most visceral. Step Into The Earthquake (2017) expanded on this: among a smattering of pleasing melodies ("Hail Mary," "Earthquake" and "I'm Feeling It Today" being among the best) lay the terrifying industrial nightmare of "I Dreamed I Saw Lou Reed Last Night." This 19-minute monster is a cross between "Sister Ray" and Neil Young at his strangest, with drone metal sections thrown in. His newest album, Coyote Butterfly (2024), deals with his grief following the death of his son. It's not his best album, but it could be his most emotionally resonant.
PSF: "Eight Verses" is an unrelenting nightmare - it's undoubtedly one of the most powerful songs in your catalogue. The last line, however, has always confounded me: "we bury our answers six feet beneath our questions." I've always felt that we bury our questions six feet beneath our answers. Do you see it differently?
SJ: "Eight Verses" isn't one that people bring up often, maybe because of the "unrelenting nightmare" angle! I'm not sure everyone would agree that it's one of my best songs in any case. It's definitely one of my bigger "idea" songs as opposed to the more common narrative ones, which are more approachable. I can appreciate what I was trying to do but the problem with abstract, idea songs is they often feel like the writer is showing off, or worse, pontificating. Some work better than others, that's for sure. Anyway, the last verse is about humanity's persistent belief in god, I suppose. I quoted Lucretius who warned against leaning on the supernatural when faced with difficult existential questions. I think I was just saying even though we should be smart enough to know there isn't anything beyond this mortal life, we choose to bury that truth so that we can walk around believing in the possibility of an afterlife and some guiding hand to get us through our days.
PSF: Your lyrics are heavily allegorical and often imbued with religious symbolism. How has religion (and/or spirituality) influenced you?
SJ: They are useful tools when writing about people. People believe a lot of things and it colors everything they do. I believe in people and want to use whatever metaphors are at my disposal to paint pictures of them, I guess. Myth and allegory and religious symbolism are all ways of investigating and understanding people, I think.
PSF: You've re-invented your career at least twice - first with the (comparatively) lavish arrangements of Yesterday Tomorrow and In Between and later with the intense, almost industrial clangor of "I Dreamed I Saw Lou Reed Last Night" and many of the tracks from Ghosts. Do you plan to do so again?
SJ: I don't ever really think in those terms when I'm recording an album. I just do what I'm feeling and think is appropriate at the time for that batch of material, you know? It's all Simon Joyner music, so, for me all the albums work together and are part of one consistent thing, with nothing breaking off to be something else. I'm sure some choices and some albums feel like I'm attempting to reinvent myself but that's not the case. It's all the same project. Artists grow and change and get influenced by this and that along the way and those experiences inform what they make, I think, just like how you live your life ideally. I think it's often a situation where the audience wants one thing you've done to keep repeating for them and they aren't always interested as much in where you actually are now at any given moment. But I like to think that the albums are always who the artist is, as a growing and changing person. It's the audience who is actually engaged in departing and returning all of the time because sometimes they are with you and other times they are not.
PSF: Do you think your music will still be listened to hundreds of years from now? Your output has obviously been underrated (or perhaps just overlooked) up to now, do you suppose that will change?
SJ: I don't think anyone's music will be listened to hundreds of years from now! It's for today and that's enough for me. As for my output, I feel good about how many people are listening. If it's somewhat unknown or overlooked, it may be by design. I have only ever wanted to play the kind of show where I could theoretically make out a familiar face in the back row with the lights and my glasses on. Any more people than that and it doesn't quite feel like we're sharing an experience. If I were any more popular, I'd probably perform less, honestly, though I'd certainly continue making records.
PSF: "When Will The Sun Rise Again" is arguably your most haunting song (or, at least, the most surreal and abstract). What are your thoughts on it?
SJ: I'd say it's about the anxieties of modern life. Feeling uprooted and worried. Using the old pathetic fallacy to illustrate those feelings, I suppose. An early attempt at working a pop song.
PSF: Who is "Christine"? For that matter, who are the litany of people depicted in "Fools Gold On Main St.?" Are most of your songs autobiographical?
SJ: Christine is a real person, so are the others. But, I use real people or real events from my life fairly liberally. On one hand, it's all autobiographical and on another, none of it is. I don't think it's important to know what's real and what is invented so long as it feels true to the listener. I think everyone knows Christine, I wouldn't go and ruin that by telling you where my Christine lives (or lived).
PSF: What do you think are your best songs? Your worst?
SJ: I don't really think of songs that way. They all go in and out of being relatable to me depending on what's going on in my life. Sometimes, a song I wrote thirty years ago suddenly means a lot to me after years of not really connecting with it. Even songs I wrote in my late teens about first love and other sorrows can contain something I still really appreciate. In terms of best and worst, the best ones work and the worst ones don't, but those will be different sets of songs for different people and at different times in their lives, I think. I haven't written many songs I didn't care about at the time so I'm reluctant to damn any of them.
PSF: How do you feel about the new album? How should listeners approach it?
SJ: If anyone has experienced loss and grief, I think the new album will offer something for them. It helped me to write those songs and record them. I think my band played really beautifully and sensitively and while the album is exploring the hardest thing to experience, it's not hopeless.
PSF: "I Dreamed I Saw Lou Reed Last Night" is a strange and singular beast. What can you tell us about it? I'm primarily interested in how the intriguing soundscape came into existence, though I'm also curious whether the song references an actual dream, etc.
SJ: Thank you. The song title is an homage to the old '30's song "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" about the labor activist songwriter, followed decades later by "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night" by Billy Bragg about the '60's activist songwriter. Lou Reed is particularly fearless in his excoriation of modern America on the New York album and that album had a big effect on me when I decided to write a political song.
After Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman and while witnessing the rising to the surface of latent racism and bigotry in the country that led to Trump's first election, I felt I needed to write something to respond to what I was seeing. The first section of the song is imagined advice from Lou Reed to be fearless if I was going to say anything at all and the second section is a re-working of Woody Guthrie's "Vigilante Man," a protest song exposing vigilante types who take justice into their own hands. And then it leads to howling and screaming "Why?" which refers to a song by Yoko Ono from her Plastic Ono Band album which seemed like a fitting resolution to me after "Vigilante Man." We approached it like a Can song, establishing a rhythm and improvising over the repeating bass line and let it develop naturally. It was a pretty incredible experience- the band responded viscerally to the subject matter and really delivered.
I actually did have a dream after Lou Reed died where he was giving me advice and I expanded it to reference the other "I Dreamed I Saw..." songs that came before. The piano intro was sewn onto the front. A tornado had hit my parent's farm and took the old barn that had been there since the Civil War and the only thing left standing after was the busted and water-logged piano. I had a recording on my phone of me and my friends trying to play it in the field from the previous summer and it somehow felt like a fitting way to introduce a song about a broken America, still standing but no longer working correctly or living up to its original promise.
SJ as seen on Pocket Moon
