Atavistic Records
2001
Hotel Lives
About This Album
On his ninth outing, Simon Joyner moves two notches up the songwriter's scale and takes on all comers. He and producer Michael Krassner have crafted a wrenching, emotionally wrought, and musically ambitiously album that is based around Joyner's keen eye for seeing in the shadows -- those lost, those left, and those damned. His empathy and tenderness for his protagonists is heartbreaking, as if he could see not only himself in all of these characters, but his family and friends too. It's not critical hype to say that Joyner possesses the same emotional depth as Leonard Cohen, or the same ability to tell a story. Here are the inhabitants of the boarding house in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, still staggering or sitting wondering what's become of their lives. Joyner's characters tell their stories as if from shock, in the aftermath of their disbelief at the beginning of quiet, devastating acceptance. Songs such as "The Blue Hammer" is a first-person narrative of a man who became a traveler because he "lived alone because she left me that way," and who encounters all manner of humanity on his way toward a fire he finds himself engulfed in and cannot escape.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,4,5,6,9,10 and 12)

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