Lost With The Lights On

In over a decade of artistic exploration, Simon Joyner has never been content to make the same record twice. "Lost With The Lights On" is Simon Joyner’s ninth full-length album, and it is a sprawling document in the grand tradition of the post-Dylan singer-songwriter epic. It begins with the narrator declaring “I got sick in the rain on some holy day, dreaming of St. Teresa and I lost all your pills after they spilled out of the bottle into my possible futures” and what follows are the promised vignette raptures, the possible futures from a creviced palm, where time and despair are corrosive but hope is never completely beaten, where dream and reality collide, standing in for each other on either side of a viscous world neither can complete alone. Some characters plummet unceremoniously, some rise. The human heart may be heading for an eclipse, the world is sometimes shooting for apocalypse, and Joyner takes us where we didn’t want to go, to the darkest places, the deepest wells, where a glimmer of a light or a cast shadow can never be taken for granted.