Simon Joyner 
A perennial favorite around here, Simon Joyner has tattooed his insightful missives across the better part of the last few decades. There’s always been a bittersweet vulnerability to Joyner’s works, but on his latest he’s balancing grief with self-forgiveness, and doing so with the kind of skill many lesser songwriters could easily fumble. The record comes in the wake of 2024’s quietly devastating Coyote Butterfly, an album that dealt with the death of Joyner’s son. Naturally, the subject is threaded through the heart of Tough Love as well, but there are more layers to the new album. It’s as much about the lives left behind as the one that departed. It’s an album that wrestles with the guilt as much as the grief. The record is rolled in more tumult and tension than often creeps into Joyner’s work, pairing the morning light laments with a more acerbic tack, listing into VU volatility and rhythmic grist.
Hints of the latter came to those who caught Joyner last year on the road with The Nervous Stars. The band brought a full-tilt vision of Simon’s back catalog and gave hints at the new directions detailed here on Tough Love. The throb begins in earnest on “Isn’t This How the Story Always Begins?”, percolating beneath the bass and cracking open into a cathartic end that scrapes against the rocks with fractious results. There’s a shadow of Reed on the soft sway of “In A Room Like This,” but it’s as the record swings to its close that the real diversion from his typical writing opens up. The 20-minute closer is an exfoliation of grief, of survivor’s guilt, all told from the perspective of his departed son. The song stings, digging its nails under the skin and setting a fitting tone in slow paces lacerated with the drone and din of inner turmoil. The record wrestles with unfinished business and unresolved worries, but ultimately it comes to a sort of peace, though by no means an easy one. Tough Love is another high water wader from Joyner, a songwriter never content to let his legacy be behind him.
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