Pocket Moon Simon Joyner

• 1You Never Know05:30
• 2Blue Eyed Boy03:49
• 3Tongue of a Child04:35
• 4You're Running Away, David03:50
• 5Morning Sun, Slow Down03:47
• 6Yellow Jacket Blues03:56
• 7Pocket Moon05:31
• 8The Last Time I Saw You, Billy05:45
• 9Sean Foley's Blues05:24
• 10Time Slows Down in Dreams04:12
• 11Blue Lullaby03:52
• Total Runtime50:11

Info for Pocket Moon

For his new album Pocket Moon, Joyner opted to engage in a risky artistic challenge. Instead of leaning on his fertile pool of Omaha musicians (the amorphous Ghosts band), he asked friend and frequent collaborator Michael Krassner to assemble unknown players on his behalf specifically for this recording. He then traveled from his home base to Krassner’s “7-Track Shack” studio in Phoenix to record the album, abandoning the literal and figurative comfort zone of old habits and home field advantage. Simultaneously sparser and more immediate than 2017’s obliquely topical Step Into The Earthquake, Pocket Moon is instantly one of Joyner’s finest albums since his redoubtable 2012 double album masterpiece, Ghosts, or to some ears the excellent, sonic 180 he managed with his follow-up, Grass, Branch & Bone. Krassner’s wrecking crew is sturdy, versatile, and complementary. Utilizing a wide range of instruments and textures, the band contributes additional nuance to each of the ragged, sublime songs here. Throughout, Krassner emerges as the Lee Underwood to Joyner’s Tim Buckley: a sympathetic foil and musical empath who comes to Joyner’s music with not only the intuition born of years of collaboration and friendship (he’s produced nearly all Joyner’s albums since 1998’s “Yesterday, Tomorrow and In Between” after all), but also with a highly evolved musical ear. The result is another song cycle stylistically unified, dynamic and rich.

Of course, there are also the lyrics. As a wordsmith Joyner belongs to a very exclusive group of living songwriters whose written lyrics on the page seem to suggest their own distinct, internal music. Pocket Moon —a decidedly more personal album than its predecessor — continues Joyner’s habit of “naming names.” As on previous albums, Pocket Moon contains songs that explicitly mention Joyner’s friends, family members, bandmates, and even neighbors. Habitual lyric sheet perusers will also note that Joyner is well acquainted with the mechanics of poetic form: the marvelous “Blue Eyed Boy” is written in something of an irregular pantoum; elsewhere, Joyner gracefully deploys personification, metaphor, and reification like some cornhusking John Ashbery: stars twinkle out of nervousness and cicadas mimic the radiator; coyotes throw confetti. Joyner — never one to resort to trite whiskey confessions or inscrutable word salad — tempers his spiritual, philosophical, and existential observations with a stand-up comic’s sensitivity to some of the smaller, less noticed things. Imagine the raw humanity of Tim Hardin or the deathless wisdom of Leonard Cohen rendered via the consolatory ramble of a drug buddy’s “hey, didja ever notice…”

Pocket Moon finds Joyner’s myriad powers undiminished, his legacy assured, his muse dogged and insatiable, his writing sharper than ever. As his narrator reminds us in the devastating song “Tongue of a Child,” “...everything looks clean when you stand back so far, a swallowtail shredding its wings against the sides of this jar.” This is music as mindfulness: Joyner is unwilling to simply report the sweeping gestures but instead observes the violence, beauty, and absurdity of everyday life up close and dares you to join him in laughing at it, ruminating on it, or running from it screaming.

"Omaha has given us the reigning heir to Henry Miller's dark emotional mirror, Townes Van Zandt's three-chord moan, and Lou Reed's warehouse minimalism: his name is Simon Joyner." — Gillian Welch

"Pound for pound Simon Joyner is my favorite lyricist of all time. He has shades of all the greats (Van Zandt, Cohen, Dylan) but exists in a space all his own ... He truly is an American songwriting treasure. It is my hope that more people will discover his music and share in the unique joy that it brings." — Conor Oberst

"Simon's always been a secret handshake amongst me and my peers. He's a pioneer. He's helped pave the way for many people, myself included. He's an artist in its purest form--for his only concern is crafting a perfect song--which he's done time and time again." — Kevin Morby

Simon Joyner

Simon Joyner
Cited as a key influence by Conor Oberst (of Bright Eyes) and Beck, Omaha, Nebraska native and singer/songwriter Simon Joyner has been putting out delicate, intimate, mournful songs since the early '90s. Staunchly independent, Joyner opted out of working with managers, booking agents, and publicists and focused on songcraft first, resulting in a wealth of brilliant albums like 2015's Grass, Branch & Bone.

Joyner was born in 1971 and settled in Omaha. He was recording collections of his songs by the early '90s and released his first widely available album in 1993, when the One Hour label released his Room Temperature CD. The decade was prolific for the songwriter, as he released a plethora of albums, 7"s, and EPs, including proper albums like 1995's Heaven's Gate and 1999's The Lousy Dance, a collaborative 7" with The Mountain Goats, and much more. Joyner's profile expanded considerably when legendary, taste-making DJ John Peel played his 1994 album The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll in its entirety on his BBC show. In 2001, along with his band the Fallen Men, Joyner released To Almost No One, a tribute to ten singer/songwriters, including Paul Siebel, Anne Briggs, Kris Kristofferson, and Jerry Jeff Walker. The bleak but critically lauded Hotel Lives arrived that same year, followed by the equally introspective Lost with the Lights On in 2004. A compilation of singles and rarities, Beautiful Losers was released in 2006, as was Skeleton Blues from Jagjaguwar. In 2008, Joyner released Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll on Team Love and Out Into the Snow followed on the same label in 2009. It wouldn't be until 2012 that the normally prolific Joyner would release another album, but that year's double-disc Ghosts saw him backed by a full band. The next year, New Secrets emerged, the second collaboration between Joyner and Shrimper Records founder Dennis Callaci following their 2004 EP Stranger Blues. After a long absence, Joyner returned with the contemplative, downbeat Grass, Branch & Bone in 2015. Joyner processed the historic and disruptive American election of 2016 as the microcosm, looking through the fictional lives of its citizens to get beneath the hype and smoke of mass media. Working with longtime collaborator Michael Krassner at Omaha's ARC Studio, he recorded 13 songs, including the epic, suite-like closer "I Dreamed I Saw Lou Reed Last Night." (On the vinyl version it took up an entire side.) The finished album, Step Into the Earthquake, was issued by Ba Da Bing in the fall of 2017. After the usual touring cycle, he returned two years later with Pocket Moon.

This album contains no booklet.