Simon Joyner
Hotel Lives

THE REVIEW

"Here's another song about an old hotel,
a place where you can get back up at the same point where you fell" ("Hotel Suite")

And how easy it is to fall when your thoughts go to settle at the bottom of an empty bottle, lost in a foreign place you would never grope through in the dark, a place that doesn't smell of you or anyone else, pervaded by the ticking of the clock producing a deafening noise, the annoying background of a forced pause until tomorrow. You find yourself drowsy in the last glimmers of the afternoon filtered through the blinds or in the final act of a leaden sky that announced itself already at dawn.

Whether it's light or darkness, dawn or dusk, time is an abstract concept in this outpost of existence.

Like the "lands visited in thought" in Calvino's fantastic imagination, hotel rooms are a spiritual dimension, a crossroads of fates wrecked over time or remote traces of memory, crystallized in a photograph.

Simon has lived part of his life in hotel rooms. The story of "Hotel Lives" is his story, adorned here and there with little lies and half-truths, so as not to feel completely naked. Often, he enjoyed a surprising, unexpected intimacy in this place of everyone and as often made a bitter reassessment, painting it as a building without walls, a glass box. In short, places to escape from, leaving everything behind.

Without hesitation, pervaded by a feeling of loneliness and abandonment, Joyner escaped from his world to another world, only to return with the most tragic and fatal ending one can imagine.

"I woke up with smoke and fire on the ceiling, when you withdraw the hammer, the forest attacks" (The Blue Hammer")

Indeed, "Hotel Lives" is a markedly gray work, where resignation prevails over hope like a lucid relentless cynicism that crushes every ambition, if it ever existed. The characters that crowd its rooms, mirrored images of himself, summon their own demons, sometimes with voiceless voices, others with a passionate and inspired tone, burnt by restlessness and disorientation.

"When I can't sleep I turn around... I have a pain inside that makes me a bit mean" ("Insomnia")

From the window, he gazes at scraps of life down there on the street, then returns to sit on the bed, picks up the guitar, and with disenchantment imprinted on his face, resumes narrating things as they are, without adding color or taking it away. The truth, whether you like it or not. The arpeggio that expands along the walls of the room, dancing with the floral themes of the wallpaper, is one of the most diabolical deceptions that can be devised, a siren's song, the kiss of death, or just a desperate cry for help for fear of being alone.

"Why do you always have to seek a vacant place in every hotel life you touch?"
("Now We Must Face Each Other")

Joyner, like Leonard Cohen, David Ackles, and Nick Drake in the past, has his shards of glass as pasture for his soul, living with acceptance the pains of human existence and narrating them without holding back. The theme of solitude and abandonment are among the most recurring, a bleeding wound, an open account with life.

He takes his clothes out of our room, [...] starts the car and goes down the hill. Now the house is terribly silent [...] And soon winter will come and the snow will find me hidden" ("The House")

In "Your Old Haunts," the instrumental part alone would have been enough, an air laden with a thousand words without uttering any. The words are there anyway. Sinister words and at the bottom of the abyss, finally, a glimmer of hope.

"The past can be very dangerous but it is often willing to forgive"

A sparse harmony leads the music through the darkness, alternated with sharp short riffs and Joyner's voice, a luminous buoy in a sea black as pitch. And when "wine-soaked words have turned to vinegar" ("Nocturne"), Morpheus arrives in the rooms of the defeated, bending the last resistances on the final chords.

Yes, because in hotel rooms you mostly sleep and wait for tomorrow, without illusions and with a solid certainty, that of getting back up at the same point where you fell.