Simon Joyner has spent more than three decades constructing one of the most devastating bodies of songs in American underground music. His catalog is steeped in bleak, Midwestern imagery, haunted characters, and unflinching emotional honesty that has drawn praise from the likes of Beck, Gillian Welch, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, and fellow Omaha songwriter Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst.
With his most recent album, Coyote Butterfly, Joyner taps into a deeper vein of sorrow and resilience, reckoning with the loss of his son Owen, who died in August of 2022. The result is one of the most affecting albums in his career—and he’s bringing it to the stage with a six-piece band that adds weight to every cracked note, every rich musical texture, and every solemn word.
Simon Joyner & the Nervous Stars’ lineup includes Australian songwriter Leah Senior (keyboards, vocals, and percussion) and her partner Jesse Williams (guitar), both of whom accompanied Joyner during a recent tour of Australia and New Zealand. The live band also includes Mychal Marasco on drums and Phoenix-based brothers and experimental musicians Caleb (bass and vocals) and Micah Dailey (guitar, miscellaneous instruments, and tape loops).
Following the lead of Joyner’s voice and guitar, the group moves with unhurried rhythms and quiet existential resonance. Together, they’ll breathe new life into some of Coyote Butterfly’s bedrock numbers such as “The Silver Birch” and “Port of Call,” allowing the grief to unfold in real time.
If Coyote Butterfly explores a raw, open wound, songs from Joyner’s upcoming album, Tough Love, promise a more complicated take on perseverance and connection. Many of the songs from the LP in-progress are being revealed here for the first time on this tour. Both albums are intrinsically linked.
“For the kinds of tough love the album addresses, there’s the tough love that exists between citizen and government where you love the country but are struggling with its faults and are at the point of choosing to fight for it to change or maybe abandon it,” Joyner says. “There are a couple of political songs on the album dealing with the state of the country right now. There’s the tough love between siblings, and the tough love of a marriage or any romantic partnership. And of course the tough love as the term first came about, where loved ones of an addict wrestle with how to support the person they love who is struggling and sometimes resort to tactics which isolate or cut off the person struggling with the problem. There are a million little ways we all behave which could be forms of tough love, so the album is about people in various kinds of relationships behaving like humans do which is sometimes good but not always.”
Recently, Joyner & the Nervous Stars released a 7-inch and a CD featuring Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Velvet Underground covers to raise money to help offset the cost of taking a six-piece band on the road.
The group will also play various songs from throughout Joyner’s career, all elevated to the full-bodied sound that a six-piece band affords. Joyner’s songs have always balanced poetry and brutal realism, but there’s a new weight in the air this time—a sense that the personal and political grief he’s singing about is inescapable, but not insurmountable. These songs don’t offer resolution. They offer endurance, and in this moment, that might be exactly what the world needs.
A version of this story first appeared in the August 25 issue of Record Plug Magazine.
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