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2LP
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GY16 001LP
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$36.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 5/29/2026
"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. 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."
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CD
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GY14 009CD
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"Coyote Butterfly is the first album of new songs in two years from singer-songwriter, Simon Joyner, following the overdose death of his son, Owen, in August of 2022. Drawing on the kaleidoscopic nature of grief, Joyner explores his loss through a series of imagined dialogues and raw confessions. The album is a tribute to Owen, but what Joyner generously delivers is an intimate glimpse at his attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible. The album is bookended by field recordings overlaid with minimalist guitar laments. The first, a spring thrum of sparrows and red-winged blackbirds, functions as an invitation to the elegies which follow, while the last, the late-August drone of cicadas returns us to a life of sweat on the skin, sirens in the distance, and the things we cannot change but must somehow accept. In between these instrumentals, Joyner grapples with regret and fear, shame and love. From the opening song, 'I'm Taking You With Me' to the gut-wrenching remorse of 'My Lament,' Joyner lays bare the struggles of those left in the wake of personal devastation. On the title track, we hear Joyner perform an elemental incantation, a heartbroken ode infused with forgiveness. The final song of the album, 'There Will be a Time,' is a meditation on a future where such suffering, both personal and universal, might be softened by understanding. The musicians playing alongside Simon on Coyote Butterfly are among his closest friends; David Nance, James Schroeder, Kevin Donahue, Ben Brodin, and Michael Krassner. It's thanks to their sensitive arrangements and loving support that the songs on Coyote Butterfly could be performed and documented."
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LP
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GY14 009LP
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LP version. "Coyote Butterfly is the first album of new songs in two years from singer-songwriter, Simon Joyner, following the overdose death of his son, Owen, in August of 2022. Drawing on the kaleidoscopic nature of grief, Joyner explores his loss through a series of imagined dialogues and raw confessions. The album is a tribute to Owen, but what Joyner generously delivers is an intimate glimpse at his attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible. The album is bookended by field recordings overlaid with minimalist guitar laments. The first, a spring thrum of sparrows and red-winged blackbirds, functions as an invitation to the elegies which follow, while the last, the late-August drone of cicadas returns us to a life of sweat on the skin, sirens in the distance, and the things we cannot change but must somehow accept. In between these instrumentals, Joyner grapples with regret and fear, shame and love. From the opening song, 'I'm Taking You With Me' to the gut-wrenching remorse of 'My Lament,' Joyner lays bare the struggles of those left in the wake of personal devastation. On the title track, we hear Joyner perform an elemental incantation, a heartbroken ode infused with forgiveness. The final song of the album, 'There Will be a Time,' is a meditation on a future where such suffering, both personal and universal, might be softened by understanding. The musicians playing alongside Simon on Coyote Butterfly are among his closest friends; David Nance, James Schroeder, Kevin Donahue, Ben Brodin, and Michael Krassner. It's thanks to their sensitive arrangements and loving support that the songs on Coyote Butterfly could be performed and documented."
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CD
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GY12 001CD
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"Artists are not athletes. The career of the athlete is, by mortal necessity, compressed and brief. No one expects to see a professional slugger in their sixties out on the diamond, much less see them vying for a pennant. Artists, on the other hand, tend to age like wine -- think Dylan, Cohen, and Cash -- with the most rarefied among them capable of swinging for the fences with every at bat. Omaha singer-songwriter Simon Joyner, who recently turned fifty, is such an artist, and while I'd certainly enjoy seeing his face grinning at me from a box of Wheaties, I'd rather he continue making albums like Songs From A Stolen Guitar. Songs From A Stolen Guitar was recorded across several different cities. Joyner recorded his vocals and guitar live in Omaha; bassist Wil Hendrix added his parts at home in San Francisco, Michael Krassner recorded his guitar and piano overdubs at home in Phoenix, and drummer/percussionist Ryan Jewell recorded in Colorado. This musical chain letter then made its way back to Omaha where David Nance (guitars and backing vocals), Ben Brodin (organ and vibraphone), and Megan Siebe (viola and backing vocals) overdubbed -- separately -- their respective contributions The remoteness of the individual players on Songs From A Stolen Guitar, while necessarily eliminating some of the ragged spontaneity of much of Joyner's previous work, yields a sort of silver-lining effect: Joyner's songs, produced more meticulously and perhaps more intentionally here than on any of his previous albums, cut through that much cleaner, foregrounding both his dazzling wordplay and his clarity of vision. If Ghosts [2012] was his Tonight's The Night -- clamorous, naked, and unmoored -- Songs From A Stolen Guitar may just turn out to be his Harvest." --James Jackson Toth aka Wooden Wand
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CD
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GY9 004CD
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"'Singer-songwriter' is a frustratingly confining term; to truly understand exactly just how confining, look no further than the recorded works of Simon Joyner, an artist whose work consistently transcends the narrow parameters of genre classifications and record shop bin cards. Though his music has always honored, reckoned with -- wrestled with -- the tradition set forth by his songwriting forebears (Cohen, Van Zandt, Ochs, Dylan, Reed to name a few), Joyner can always be counted on to defy expectations; as a lyricist, melodicist, and arranger, Joyner likes to keep us on our toes. 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. The result is another song cycle stylistically unified, dynamic and rich." --James Jackson Toth
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LP
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GY9 004LP
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LP version. "'Singer-songwriter' is a frustratingly confining term; to truly understand exactly just how confining, look no further than the recorded works of Simon Joyner, an artist whose work consistently transcends the narrow parameters of genre classifications and record shop bin cards. Though his music has always honored, reckoned with -- wrestled with -- the tradition set forth by his songwriting forebears (Cohen, Van Zandt, Ochs, Dylan, Reed to name a few), Joyner can always be counted on to defy expectations; as a lyricist, melodicist, and arranger, Joyner likes to keep us on our toes. 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. The result is another song cycle stylistically unified, dynamic and rich.' --James Jackson Toth"
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