Turning a book of poetry into effective music isn't as easy as it might seem, but Simon Joyner insists on doing it every time he cuts an album. Joyner puts down page upon page of stuff like, "Up in the hot air balloon the priest of lime blessed the wind and gave it reason to cover everything that dies/ But you weren't surprised the mirror had advised you to look no further for a villain/ Still the Senator's thug is sucking your thumb/ Trying to turn a black hat into a white one." When he's done, he hits the studio with friends like Michael Krassner, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Jim White, where suddenly he becomes the lost son of Leonard Cohen, spreading his words across a skeletal backing with his temperamental baritone.
The Cohen comparison comes as much from the dour, literate tone of Joyner's work as it does from the sound of the music itself. Joyner's poems become sprawling, broken ballads, the individual songs almost incidental to the overall epic arc of the whole album. Whereas his last two albums of original compositions, 2001's Hotel Lives and 1999's The Lousy Dance, employed fairly broad instrumental palettes, Lost with the Lights On (his seventh, if you include his covers album) is immersed in gothic folk with occasional steel guitar flourishes. Piano and cello provide most of the album's color, and songs unfold at a pace a 90-year-old man would feel comfortable driving at, lingering for seven and eight minutes with no concessions to such widely employed songwriting conventions as choruses and bridges.
In the three years since his last album, Joyner seems to have found more time for, if not outright optimism, then at least lightness. "Flying Dreams" is almost joyous, with a buoyant melody and nearly whimsical delivery-- though it's important to note that all of the happiness in the song occurs while he sleeps. And, of course, there's still disaster around the corner: "Flying dreams can turn ugly, too/ The plane nosedives out of the blue/ And spirals out of control/ When everything was so still before."
The album's most startling song is easily its closer, "Forgotten Blues", whose backing sounds essentially like a parlor blues band melting, the instruments combining with Beefheartian random precision as White drops two and three snare hits at a time from his drum part to leave huge gaps of open space for the wandering electric guitars to fall into. As the busted blues staggers sideways and Joyner's poetry book slams shut, the album feels remarkably complete for something uses none of the bookending techniques that so often make records feel like tidy statements. Structurally, Lost with the Lights On is more like a modernist novel than an album, a glimpse into a point in someone's life somewhere between fulfillment and despair with no real beginning middle or end, and somehow it works.
