Simon Joyner heads south

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What brings you on the road this summer?

I’ve been writing some new songs, so I had an itch to perform them. I realized with all the things going on in my life right now that if I wanted to do a tour on this side of the country for my last record, I better do it now. And I have this book of selected lyrics, too, Only Love Can Bring You Peace. I also haven’t done a solo tour in a long time. Usually I take a trio at least. I like having extra instrumentation and playing off of other players. But there’s something frightening and therefore exciting about performing solo that I don’t want to forget about. So I need to get myself out there sometimes with no security blanket. It’s more work because any variation and improvisation that I need to do to keep the songs interesting relies completely on how I perform the songs. But I think people like to hear songs in a completely stark state sometimes. These living room tours are perfect for that experience.

Is there an underlying theme to the set lists you’ve been rehearsing?

Yes, people are complicated, and not always in a good way. I think life prepares us for death. We start out naive and open to experience, but being so open to experience requires accepting it all: the horrible and discouraging and worst along with the rest. So we change, we adapt and attempt to balance what we love about life against what we know is possible and probable about it, too. You don’t want the scales to get too out of whack or you end up some kind of ghost going through the motions, you know? People will surprise you in every way possible, sometimes reaffirming the best and sometimes confirming the worst. The art of living is the balancing act, to continue to appreciate the complexity of a life full of as much suffering as joy. I know that the first laugh you allow yourself after your parent or spouse dies will hurt you as much as their dying in the first place. Moments like that and the reasons behind them are what I’m interested in. People’s contradictions, that fierce will to live, to enjoy, and how we beat ourselves up about so much in the process of striking a balance. I find that my songs are often dealing with those little everyday struggles and how it sometimes works for people and sometimes doesn’t.

In rehearsing songs for touring, I always try to do a mixture of old and new. It keeps it interesting for me, and I think the audiences appreciate it, especially if they’ve been following my career a while. I mostly gravitate to songs that I think translate well as solo acoustic songs. Some songs just work better with a band, you know. I’ll probably practice 60 songs and then tailor the individual sets depending on my mood and the feel of the crowd on that particular night. I remember seeing Vic Chesnutt in a gallery space in 1991. He had an entire list of his songs on the back of his guitar and just referred to that after every song to see what he felt like playing next. I thought that was a great way to do it. I’m also asking attendees to post any requests to the Facebook event pages, so I can rehearse any songs that people want to hear. I can’t always do them, especially if it’s a song I have a hard time still relating to, but I usually can.

Do you gravitate toward a specific era of your songwriting?

No, I see it all as one big effort to express ideas that have taken different forms over the years. There are songs that I don’t enjoy playing, either from playing too many times or from being in a particularly strange mental or emotional place when I wrote them. I stick to songs that still hold meaning for me regardless of what age I was when I wrote them or songs that benefit from new interpretations. There are so many ghosts of me woven into the songs that it’s always interesting to experience them again, like photo albums full of preoccupations.

Grass, Branch & Bone feels like a symbolically rich album title in your catalog. What did you have in mind when you came up with the title?

The album is full of songs about memory, essentially. Or rather, it’s about people trapped in another time in various ways. Some are still living in the past or else something that happened or didn’t happen in the past has reverberated so profoundly that they aren’t able to be really live in the present. In the song “Nostalgia Blues,” the last verse concerns two characters who knew each other back when they were both green and hungry. But all this life occurs between when they were setting out and where they are now. The narrator is wondering what’s become of his old friend, knowing they are both in really different places,longing for the opportunity to see her again to thank her for sharing that time when they were both filling their notebooks “with grass, branch, and bone” because of all that dreaming and urgency, they were feeling about doing something important with their lives. Grass, Branch & Bone is all the Walt Whitman stuff, I guess. The song seems bittersweet or cynical in the early verses, but it’s ultimately optimistic, because despite all these other verses dealing with people taking stock of their lives and finding the world especially cruel for giving them such vivid but unreachable dreams, the idea of people being led by their dreams is honored in the last verse.That last verse sums up the themes of the record. Some deal well, some make sense of things and are better for it, some have serious regrets. But it’s life and life only, like Dylan said — much more succinctly! When you look at the past, you are really talking about the present and the future, because so much of what you’ve done or not done is still being played out and will continue to be played out until there’s a break of some sort that leads to reflection and change.I wanted to write about that stuff, about whether time really heals all wounds or just ameliorates and dulls them. And to honor the struggle between how we imagine ourselves and how we actually live.

Do you have any rituals, or are favorite roadside attractions when visiting the South?

I like to visit Hank Williams’ grave, but it’s been a long time. I like to get barbecue when I’m in the Southeast, of course. I am very excited to visit New Orleans, my birthplace. It’s been too long. I have family scattered across the South. Both my parents are from Alabama, so I’d like to see some aunts and cousins. I love driving in the South and taking it all in. It’s an incredibly beautiful, haunting landscape. I don’t have any particular rituals except to hit a Waffle House, I suppose. It reminds me of my earliest tours with Alex McManus. We never had money, we made barely enough for gas to get to the next town, so we ate a lot of scattered and covered in those lean days. It was horrible, it was wonderful.

Simon Joyner with Adam Bricks. $10. 7 p.m. Mon., May 23. 2181 Edgemore Drive S.E. grapefruitrecordclub.com/t/simon-joyner.