Not the whole lot that Simon Joyner sings is autobiographical, however it’s at all times 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 adjustments you, typically knowingly and different instances with uninsightful candor. But when these written figures don’t at all times 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 undertaking the duty of composing phrases that not solely relate the advanced emotions of grief, however relate their content material with grace.
The file begins and ends with instrumentals, that are exceedingly uncommon throughout Joyner’s discography. Spare acoustic-guitar notes step intentionally via a area of birdsong, wind and vehicular sounds on the opener, “Pink-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’ll be able to nonetheless find yourself proper again the place you began.
The eight songs located between these wordless reveries take the listener via 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 approach 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 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 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