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Simon Joyner is a singer-songwriter living in Omaha, Nebraska. He's released records since 1993 on various independent labels. He's put out albums, 7"s, eps and cassettes on: One Hour Records, Sing, Eunuchs!, Shrimper, Brinkman (Netherlands), Wurlitzer Jukebox (U.K.), Tonguemaster (U.K.), Secretly Canadian, Truckstop, Seagull, Unread, Jagjaguwar, and Team Love. He tours the U.S. and Europe sporadically.
The 1994 limited pressing LP only record The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll has just been reissued by Team Love Records on LP and CD. The LP is 180 gram vinyl and comes with an MP3 download card. The Simon Joyner and the Fallen Men album Skeleton Blues is still available through Jagjaguwar and elsewhere online. Use the Jagjaguwar link below to order directly.
Jagjaguwar released a collection of his singles and compilation tracks called Beautiful Losers: Singles and Compilation Tracks 1994-1999in the middle of 2006.
His solo acoustic 1993 album Room Temperature was reissued in a limited pressing early 2006 on 2xLP (vinyl only!), also by Jagjaguwar.
To purchase these and other recent releases directly from Jagjaguwar click here.
To purchase older releases on LP or CD by Simon Joyner and other artists released by Sing, Eunuchs! Records, click here.
To download full albums from the Simon Joyner back catalog, visit iTunes where you will find all of his full length recordings for purchase.
Review of SKELETON BLUES by Thom Jurek (All Music Guide)
For those who've followed Simon Joyner's illustrious career as an outsider and underground figure relentlessly looking into the dark side of everything — not for its own sake but for what it has to teach — Skeleton Blues will be a surprise. Recorded with his working band the Fallen Men, Joyner's made his first honest-to-the-roaming-ghosts-of-all-things-that-matter rock & roll record. Those hoping for another of his quiet, sparse, introspective recordings need not fear, though they will be shocked. The set opens with "Open Window Blues," and what you hear is a younger Bob Dylan, still hungry, still trying to wrestle with his shadowy angel (muse), fronting a group as direct and no-nonsense as the Velvet Underground (circa Doug Yule) or the early Television; the Band's wondrous ambiguity and sense of history would have been ripped apart by these songs. Guitarists Dave Hawkins' and Alex McManus' interplay is both meaty and spooky. It feels like they don't work with the songs so much as set them apart and try to explode every last word, and they come close to exploding in reaction to: "But my smokestack eyes withholding rain, oppose/Another burning wheat field full of crows." The sung meter is just off enough to allow those wicked six strings to dig through the rhythm section and react with an open hostility, it pushes the singer and finally takes over, revealing what he's afraid to say. Think "John Coltrane's Stereo Blues" or Days of Wine & Roses by the Dream Syndicate but more subtle.
"You Don't Know Me" is a kind of comfort, with an easy, shuffling rock beat, but it's not, really, it's just a different frame for words that seem to dig underneath the skin, under the marrow in order to project: "The only thing worse than blacking out/Is waking up where you are/I don't belong to anyone, I don't belong to anything/I put my breath into my song/I keep my death in front of me..." The whinnying pedal steel, the guitars exchanging fluid lines, a piano, a glockenspiel, all of them holding up the tired, broken protagonist and letting him see that things aren't going to change any time soon. "Medicine Blues" is a surreal look at how we struggle, with our demons in the quest for beauty; we fight, bitch, scream and moan until we cave in and surrender. Then and only then is grace and the perception of real beauty possible. The band gives him a big bottom end, chords and knotty lead lines with a steady stomping 4/4 to make Joyner have to stretch to express. It's as loud as the man gets. The album closer, two ballads, include "Epilogue in D," where Joyner allows the band to simply float behind him on his acoustic guitar. But it's in "My Side of the Blues" that the Joyner we recognize returns to close the shop and bind the wounds. It's over ten-minutes long and it's just him and an acoustic guitar: "And the pendulum doesn't swing for passion/Even horror can't make those stubborn hands freeze/But sometimes just a soft light lit in a bedroom/Can bring a tired traveler to his knees...The trees forgave the fire that went on burning/Until hope was all that was left when the smoke cleared/And I'll forgive her body for deserting/As soon as I recall why mine is still here." The tune stutters, falls, and eventually whispers to a close, leaving the listener full of ideas, notions and an inexplicable feeling that somehow, now that it's over and done, everything has changed. What remains is the silence, and the feeling of some ghost at her shoulder. This is the path Joyner has been walking on for decades, and it seems that the road and wounds have resulted in his masterpiece.
Review of SKELETON BLUES by Matthew Murphy (Pitchfork)
"The only thing worse than blacking out is waking up just where you are," Simon Joyner sings on Skeleton Blues, his tenth proper album, and it's certainly not the first time that Joyner has made it sound as though he's best not left alone with his own thoughts.
It seems fortunate then, for him and for us, that on this album he's rarely left alone, but has instead the full-time backing of his veteran Omaha band the Fallen Men. On such earlier works as 1998's Yesterday, Tomorrow and In Between or 2004's Lost With the Lights On, Joyner's sparse arrangements could cast his long-winded confessionals with an almost sickly, florescent-bulb pallor. Here, though, the Fallen Men feverishly work the bellows, pumping these seven overcast tracks full of unruly rock dynamism. Though their spirited presence virtually ensures Skeleton Blues to be the noisiest album in Joyner's catalog, it also leavens the bleakness of his visions enough to also make it his most approachable.
Anchored throughout by Michael Krassner's sturdy piano and Lonnie Eugene Methe's additional keyboards, Joyner's chief foils here are the pedal steel and guitars of Dave Hawkins and Alex McManus. On expansive tracks like "Open Window Blues" or "Medicine Blues", this group announce themselves with a vengeance, their furious electric interchanges naturally calling to mind Crazy Horse, as well as the most raucous of Steve Wynn's post-Dream Syndicate work, or perhaps a looser, more countrified Television.
But at the center of the commotion is Joyner and his dense, poetic narratives. For several long stretches on Skeleton Blues he writes urgent transmissions in the third person, yet this song cycle is too uniformly dire and desolate for any real authorial distance. On the apocalyptic "Open Window Blues" he piles desperate image upon desperate image ("The cicadas forever throb on the fringes of the lens/ While I dance upon this shifting pile of skeletons") so thickly his tongue can barely keep up. In doing so, he boldly mirrors the breathless cadence of Bringing It All Back Home-era Dylan, with the Fallen Men's splintered guitars doing their best to keep the comparison flattering.
"Medicine Blues" returns again to these same darkened territories, with one eye fixed on the newspaper headlines ("What color is the ocean after the oil?"). But Joyner's dread lifts uneasily on tracks like the tender country lament "Answer Night" and on the album's dramatic centerpiece "The Only Living Boy in Omaha". Buoyed by cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm's graceful string arrangements, this latter track is likely the most gorgeous piece Joyner's ever created, a bittersweet hymn to the imperfect homesteads we're never fully able to abandon. It's a vivid portrait of a place and the lives it contains as a recurring dream, as Joyner sings, "Parades, alcohol, and love's swinging phantoms/ If everything rolls around again, does that mean we are free?" over a veil of strings and pedal steel as pure and aching as a late Great Plains rainstorm.
As always with a Joyner release, the biggest obstacle for many listeners will be his voice. Although at this point he sounds at peace with his vocal restrictions, his narrow range leads to melodies that seem like shadows or suggestions; as usual, his work practically begs to be re-interpreted by a more adventurous or powerhouse vocalist. After the rich opulence of "Only Living Boy", the album's closing two ballads feel somewhat anti-climactic, Joyner's narrators searching once again for a brief respite from their downcast isolation, those quiet moments when "a soft light lit in a bedroom can bring a tired traveler to his knees." Yet with the reliable assistance of the Fallen Men, on Skeleton Blues Joyner is once again able to devise a good number of such transfiguring moments.
Click here to listen to a short piece on Simon Joyner and the Omaha music scene from NPR's All Things Considered.
Click here to listen to the Simon Joyner feature from NPR's Weekend America from July 2004 (scroll to the bottom).
Click here to read an older three-part Simon Joyner interview, or here for two interviews separated by 10 years (a 2006 interview with Yet More Bias magazine followed by the 1996 interview by the same interviewer, at Circumstantial Evidence magazine).
Click here to contact Simon Joyner directly, he's only able to check his My Space messages occasionally.
Click here to sign up for the Simon Joyner mailing list. Emails will go out announcing tour dates and new releases, nothing spurious.
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