Simon Joyner

Cited as a formative influence by Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and by Beck, the singer-songwriter Simon Joyner, an Omaha, Nebraska native, has issued fragile, inward, and elegiac songs since the start of the 1990s. Though widely admired and frequently sought out for collaborations with members of Wilco, Lambchop, and the Dirty Three, Joyner has maintained complete independence throughout his career, never employing managers, booking agents, or publicists. His emphasis on craft produced a consistent sequence of distinguished albums, among them the expansive double album Ghosts in 2012, the inward meditations of Pocket Moon in 2019, and Songs from a Stolen Guitar in 2022, whose lyrics contemplated solitude and recollection. The 2024 album Coyote Butterfly assembled pieces written in the wake of his son’s death, addressing love and mourning.

Joyner was born in 1971 and made his home in Omaha. He began committing collections of songs to tape in the early 1990s, issuing his first widely distributed album in 1993 when One Hour released the Room Temperature CD. That decade proved especially productive, yielding numerous albums, 7"s, and EPs, among them the full-length Heaven’s Gate in 1995, The Lousy Dance in 1999, and a joint 7" with the Mountain Goats. His visibility grew markedly after the influential BBC broadcaster John Peel aired the entirety of the 1994 album The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll on his program. In 2001, recording with his band the Fallen Men, Joyner released To Almost No One, a collection saluting ten songwriters that included Paul Siebel, Anne Briggs, Kris Kristofferson, and Jerry Jeff Walker. The stark yet widely praised Hotel Lives appeared the same year, followed by the similarly reflective Lost with the Lights On in 2004. A compilation of singles and unreleased material, Beautiful Losers, came out in 2006, as did Skeleton Blues on Jagjaguwar. In 2008 Team Love reissued The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll, and Out Into the Snow followed on the same label in 2009. After a period of relative quiet, the normally prolific Joyner returned in 2012 with the double-disc Ghosts, supported by a full band. The following year brought New Secrets, his second project with Shrimper Records founder Dennis Callaci after their 2004 EP Stranger Blues. A lengthy interval ended with the spare, somber Grass, Branch & Bone in 2015. Processing the 2016 American election through imagined private lives rather than media spectacle, Joyner worked once more with longtime associate Michael Krassner at Omaha’s ARC Studio to record thirteen songs, among them the extended closing piece “I Dreamed I Saw Lou Reed Last Night,” which occupies an entire side of the vinyl edition. Ba Da Bing issued the resulting album, Step Into the Earthquake, in the fall of 2017. Following the customary touring period, he resurfaced two years later with Pocket Moon. Between 2020 and 2021, working remotely because of COVID-19 restrictions, Joyner laid down guitar and vocal tracks in Omaha and forwarded them to musicians including bassist Wil Hendrix, drummer Ryan Jewell, viola player Megan Siebe, multi-instrumentalist David Nance, and others; the resulting distance mirrored the album’s themes of isolation and introspection. Assembled from these exchanges, Songs from a Stolen Guitar appeared in June 2022. Subsequent touring produced a pair of limited releases: the 2023 album One Carried a Lantern, credited to Simon Joyner & the Echoes, and the 2024 LP This Is Where the Ocean Begins, which reimagined earlier material in a trio format with Krassner on electric guitar and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. The next body of entirely new material arrived with the 2024 album Coyote Butterfly, whose stark songs confronted the loss of Joyner’s son Owen and the disorienting experience of grief.