Pocket Moon Simon Joyner

• 1 You Never Know 05:30
• 2 Blue Eyed Boy 03:49
• 3 Tongue of a Child 04:35
• 4 You're Running Away, David 03:50
• 5 Morning Sun, Slow Down 03:47
• 6 Yellow Jacket Blues 03:56
• 7 Pocket Moon 05:31
• 8 The Last Time I Saw You, Billy 05:45
• 9 Sean Foley's Blues 05:24
• 10 Time Slows Down in Dreams 04:12
• 11 Blue Lullaby 03:52
• Total Runtime 50:11

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
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.