Simon Joyner - Tough Love CD

I recently came across a quote from the writer Mikal Gilmore on Lou Reed written for Rolling Stone in 1979 that seemed just as applicable to Simon Joyner’s work:

“Lou Reed doesn’t just write about squalid characters, he allows them to leer and breathe in their own voices, and he colors familiar landscapes through their own eyes. In the process, Reed has created a body of music that comes as close to disclosing the parameters of human loss and recovery as we’re likely to find. That qualifies him, in my opinion, as one of the few real heroes rock & roll has raised.”

The characters in Joyner’s songs are not so much squalid as they are flawed, complicated, and most of all, human. He steps into their voices with a generosity that brings to life thoughts, motivations, decisions, and a la Gilmore’s read on Reed, comes even closer to tracing the parameters of human loss and recovery in song. 

After the autobiographical Coyote Butterfly from 2024, Joyner has largely returned to a more familiar fictional form of songwriting. Songs detail sibling falling outs, strained relationships, urban feelings of isolation, mourning deaths, sifting through the traces and remnants of others (the track Two Black Irises feels like the mournful response to Ryan Davis’ junk drawer metaphor - or am I reading too much into this?), etc. (Another aside… I realise that rattling off the broad subject matter of some of these songs might make this LP feel like a bit of a grim affair or a difficult listen, but love here is both tough and a saviour from a tough life). 

All this in a manner that you could say evokes the best Cohen LPs which foreground his voice and the lyrics with a minimal backing where every instrument and note carries weight, here ranging from Stonesy lead guitar licks through to Kath Bloom & Loren Connors-esque fragility, to a post-VU pulse, to some understated string arrangements c/o Megan Siebe. 

Tough Love is crowned by the side-long title track, another piece in the autobiographical mosaic constructed from the last LP. Loosely recalling the song cycle of Lou Reed’s Street Hassle (see, the Gilmore quote carries even more weight), a twenty-minute almost spoken word piece that is told from the perspective of his son amidst an imagined confrontation with him. Centred around a single guitar riff, it gradually expands out from tense string arrangements to a cathartic field of synths, string drones, and lightly twinkling piano. About as devastating, confronting, and beautiful as music can get!
–Mitch