Tough Love Simon Joyner

• 1 Annelie 05:16
• 2 Wild Palms 05:48
• 3 Drowning Man 04:45
• 4 Two Black Irises 03:38
• 5 Vagabond 04:11
• 6 Isn't This How the Story Always Begins? 07:11
• 7 Winter Says 05:34
• 8 Last Call for Karaoke 03:15
• 9 In a Room Like This 04:08
• 10 How to Talk to Your Man 03:57
• 11 Allegiances 06:30
• 12 Anniversary Song 05:41
• 13 Tough Love 20:12
• Total Runtime 01:20:06

Info for Tough Love

For over 30 years, Simon Joyner has been an anomaly--a wholly independent artist focused solely on his craft. The Omaha-based singer-songwriter began releasing music in the early ‘90s, and has walked an unbroken line ever since. Joyner’s songs of quiet joy and heartache have impacted different generations of fellow artists, showing up as overt influence in acts like Bright Eyes or Kevin Morby, and as flickers of shared perspectives in the Lenkers, Oldhams, and Molinas that followed.

Tough Love, Joyner’s 19th studio album, continues this upward trend. While intrinsically linked to the personal grief of 2024’s Coyote Butterfly, the autobiographical album Joyner made in the wake of his son’s death, this new album explores the concept of tough love as a dichotomy applied to various fictional relationships including romantic, familial, and political. This balancing act comes through in vivid portrayals of everyday heartache and in the exploration of political rage and the betrayals of the American Dream.

One of the marvels of Joyner’s catalog is how his patterns don’t repeat but transform. Knowing nods to Cohen, Dylan, and the Velvets have been part of his songwriting since the early lo-fi days, but the ways these touchstones get infused keep changing. While Joyner’s ragged acoustic songs are in the spotlight, they’re prodded by electric guitars and imbued with experimental tendencies. Rock songs split the difference between minimal grooves learned from Loaded-era Velvet Underground and the ecstatic rhythmic weirdness of Can. By the time we arrive at the penultimate track, “Anniversary Song,” the ghost vocals and scratches of microtonal synth have blurred the lines between Joyner’s folk singer heart and his avant-garde spirit.

All of this leads to the 20-minute title track which closes Tough Love, an eviscerating plunge into a seemingly bottomless pit of regret, survivor’s guilt, and unvarnished grief. Borrowing a repetitious structure from Lou Reed’s narrated suite, “Street Hassle,” and combined with the full-side testimonial of Dylan’s “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” Joyner narrates from the perspective of his departed son speaking to his father and laying out his every failure and brutally highlighting how none of it can be undone. Soon, though, this agony opens up into something transcendent, in both its elegant imagery and ethereal atmospherics. The final moments of the album grant permission for self-forgiveness and hopefully someday, understanding.

This cathartic ending snaps into place all of the tangled feelings which thread through Tough Love. Much as Joyner has approached songcraft from obtuse angles that change every time he picks up the guitar to make a new album, his relationship with grief and everyday struggle and the eternal reach for something brighter changes on Tough Love as well. Again, the meaning deepens, breathing in transformation with every strum, every unexpected observation, and every weighty sigh.

Simon Joyner, guitars, harmonica, percussion, vocals
The Nervous Stars:
Caleb Dailey, bass, guitars, violin, percussion, backing vocals
Micah Dailey, guitars, sampler, percussion, backing vocals
Michael Krassner, guitars, keyboards, percussion
Mychal Marasco, drums, percussion
Additional musicians:
Ben Brodin, organ
Megan Siebe, strings (tracks 4, 7)
Laraine Kaizer, strings (track 13)

Simon Joyner
is a world-renowned American singer-songwriter from Omaha, Nebraska who has released 19 albums on independent labels since the early 1990s. His earliest records were influential signposts of the Lo-Fi and home-taping movement which also produced contemporaries like Smog, Lou Barlow, Will Oldham and the Mountain Goats. He is now widely regarded as one of the great songwriters of our generation. Gillian Welch calls him her favorite poet and Kevin Morby and Conor Oberst both claim him as a major influence with Bright Eyes also recording covers of Joyner’s songs “Burn Rubber” and “Double Joe.” John Peel, the famed British DJ, once played Joyner’s album “The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll” in its entirety on his show, a rare event journalists at the time referred to as “The Peel Incident.”

Despite often being described as a songwriter’s songwriter, the stubbornly independent artist has soared under the radar for over thirty years, enjoying cult status without ever needing to make the unholy sacrifices the industry often requires of artists looking to survive or live on their music. His storytelling has been compared to Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Lou Reed, and Bob Dylan. Over the course of 19 albums his career is hard to pin down as he’s followed a mercurial path, never content to make the same record twice.

This album contains no booklet.