Thirty years of career, more than twenty albums, but above all a commendable artistic integrity: Simon Joyner won his battle against the record system and the seduction of success, going through the most difficult years of rock music unscathed.
“Tough Love” is the last chapter of a still exciting story, a record that keeps alive the tradition of Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, that same tradition that has found new points of reference in artists like Will Oldham and Kevin Morby. It's not difficult to understand why Joyner's colleagues continue to sing his praises and point to him as a constant inspiration: the last ten years have been marked by five small recording jewels whose poetic lucidity and musical incisiveness are as intense as they are fluent and clear.
“Tough Love” once again demonstrates the remarkable mastery of an author with a confident attitude, both when he lingers on a few chords and when he embraces melodic outbursts of rare incisiveness, and in this sense the phrase inserted between the harsh and essential harmonic links of “Allengiaces” is explanatory: “Isn't it magic when the sacred yields to the profane?”. Yes, the Oklahoma musician's songs are profane poems but perfectly set in a sound context that has the gift of spirituality. Every word seems to be punctuated with strength and conviction, but also with sweetness and melancholy. And there is even a pop spirit in songs like “Drowning Man”, a song transfigured by a slowness that gives it a painful and caressing atmosphere worthy of Neil Young's “Time Fades Away”.
The never-dormant influences of the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed are obviously palpable, not only in the listless singing of “Annelie”, but also in the vibrant slow grunge from the vague references to Television in “Isn't This How The Story Always Begins?”, one of the central pages of the album, which highlights a dirtier sound, the latter element which differentiates “Tough Love” from recent productions, an attitude which finds further confirmation in the raw narration of “In A Room Like This” and in the passionate “Two Black Irises”.
Simon Joyner's latest album is perhaps his most multicolored and elusive. We move from the powerful narrative style of “Wild Palms” to the evanescent layering of microtonal synths of “Anniversary Song”, letting simple and touching country ballads germinate in between (“Vagabond”), and songs as thin as they are intimate (“Winter Says”, “Last Call For Karaoke”).
There title track is undoubtedly a page in itself: Joyner once again faces the pain of losing his son, but this time, unlike what was expressed in “Coyote Butterfly”, the point of view is not that of the author, but that of his deceased son, a brutal list of broken promises and an unachievable act of redemption; the structure is deliberately similar to Lou Reed's “Street Hassle”: exhausting and painful, the song slides towards agony and dull desperation that Joyner skillfully manages to enclose in a few dramatic words: “I watch you turn around and, just like that, you leave”.
05/29/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
