Music — Sylvie Simmons

Second album Blue on Blue
Out now on Compass Records

Listen here

Moon Over Chinatown from my first album, “Sylvie”, performed with Brad Brooks for the Vic Chesnutt Awards concert in Athens, Georgia, March 2021

SYLVIE SIMMONS - BLUE ON BLUE

"Succinct and breathtaking" - Popmatters

"Appealing grace and timeless style" - Associated Press

"Intimate, dreamy and beautifully melancholic. It carries a lifetime of in-depth musical exploration” - Aquarium Drunkard

“Sylvie’s follow-up to her rapturously-acclaimed self-titled debut is a bejeweled beauty. A shining accomplishment" - The Mirror

"A punk Piaf!" - Rosanne Cash

Compass Records is proud to present Blue on Blue, the new album by renowned singer, writer and ukulele-player Sylvie Simmons. It's the follow-up to her revelatory 2014 debut Sylvie - an album that The Guardian hailed as "One of the most beautiful albums of the year. Spell-binding," and The Times called "Poetic, guileless, reminiscent of a female Leonard Cohen."

Her unforgettable songs, delicate but sensual and bold, earned unanimous praise and rave reviews, as well as a prime slot in the 2018 Ethan Hawke/ Jesse Peretz movie Juliet, Naked, and shout-outs from fellow musicians including Rosanne Cash, Brian Wilson, M.Ward, Devendra Banhart and Elvis Costello.

If her first album seemed to appear of nowhere, in a way it did. For three and a half decades, before coming out as a singer-songwriter, Sylvie - born in London and based in California - had been an acclaimed rock writer, and the author of books including her celebrated biographies of Serge Gainsbourg, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. It was after touring around the world for more than a year behind I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (her 2012 book which now has over 25 translations), singing his songs and accompanying herself on a ukulele, that Sylvie did the near-impossible and crossed over into writing and recording her own songs, with the encouragement and accompaniment of Howe Gelb of Giant Sand, who produced her first album.

In 2017, Sylvie returned to Tucson to make her second album with Gelb. But the work came to an abrupt halt. That first evening, after recording first takes of five of the songs, Sylvie suffered a dreadful accident that left her with multiple broken bones, major nerve damage and an unusable left hand. Life became a long and painful period of surgeries and rehabilitation, recording them in different studios closer to home in-between treatments.

But listening to Blue on Blue, you’d never know there had been a problem. Seamless and beautiful, with its memorable songs and spacious, unexpected arrangements, once again it highlights her intimate vocals and intelligent lyrics that at first listen seem dreamy and gentle but hold hidden barbs and pain. From the opening song, “Keep Dancing,” where she sings “The man said you were dancing with no shoes on amid the broken glass and dog shit and cigarette ends,” you know you’re in for no ordinary ride. Or "Nothing", a strange, dark, childhood memory with the lines, "Now I’m running for the train/Same train everyone is running for/ Before there’s nothing to take you where you want to go/Maybe I'll find you there/ Maybe I'll find nothing." "Not In Love" sounds like a lost Roy Orbison song; "Sweet California" is a bittersweet love song to her adopted state; and "The Thing They Don’t Tell You About Girls” finds her balanced on a roof, “Just to hear my heart still beat"

The album ends with a duet, "1000 Years Before I Met You” - Sylvie and Gelb toughing it out like a countrified Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, with Sylvie singing , "Well go on, put your clothes on and walk right out the door/Don't want to see you when the sun creeps through the blind/ If you’re thinking I’ll come running and beg you back for more/ Then baby you’ve been drinking more than I.”

As one writer noted, “These are songs that persuade us to curl up with them, then bite when we’re warm and cozy."

The band on Blue on Blue consists of Gelb, Thoger Lund, Gabriel Sullivan and Brian Lopez from Tucson, with guest appearances by Jim White and Matt Wilkinson, and Sylvie playing ukulele.

As the San Francisco Chronicle review said, "With Blue on Blue she's delivered another quietly mesmerizing collection of deceptively wistful and insinuating songs that flow on a gentle pulse, carrying more than a trace of [Leonard] Cohen’s unmistakable literary DNA.”

REVIEWS

Allmusic.com ***.5
American Songwriter
Aquarium Drunkard
Athens Voice, Greece
Bay Bridged
Bluestown Music
Chronicle
Folk Radio Magazine
Glide
Hollywood Times
Muse Patrol
Popmatters
Rolling Stone, France ****
San Francisco Classical Voice
Section 26
Ukulele Magazine
Vinyl District

SYLVIE SIMMONS - SYLVIE

“A lovely voice, a unique voice, the kind of voice that people will get into- that they’ll want to get into.” – Bob Johnston

“Fragile and fearless, direct and poetic, such a beautifully constructed and timeless album…
Rosalie Sorrels meets the Only Ones!” – Devendra Banhart

“Sweet music just like Sylvie” – Brian Wilson

Light In The Attic has an impeccable reputation for uncovering rare and precious albums from the past. Their latest release, Sylvie, is haunting and out-of-time—but it is also a brand-new, original debut album, by a singer-writer who has been making music since she was a little girl but just for herself. Like Devendra Banhart says, Sylvie is “a gem of an album, fragile and fearless, direct and poetic, timeless and absolutely beautiful. Like Rosalie Sorrels meets the Only Ones.” Or Isobel Campbell on a lost desert night, maybe, with only the moon and a ukulele for company.

The raw, delicate, and sensual songs about love and love gone wrong are performed on a ukulele, which here sounds like a broken harp or a heartbroken guitar. “I’d always thought of the uke as a toy, a little handful of happiness,” says Sylvie, “but not any more. My first ukulele—in fact all my ukuleles—came to me by accident, under strange circumstances usually involving mysterious, vanishing men. From the moment I picked it up, I fell in love. A uke has a sad, fractured sweetness and a modesty. It doesn’t try to impress you, it almost apologizes for being there. The notes are like feathers; you play them and they’re blown away in a second. And yet these songs kept coming through this tiny instrument with all their heartbreak and truth intact.”

The first person to hear them was Howe Gelb of Giant Sand. “I’d send them one at a time, as I’d written them, and if I left it too long before sending another, he would ask for the next installment. We would talk about recording an album of them one day, and we did.” Meanwhile, she began to make tentative moves back onto the stage, having abandoned it in her teens due to “paralyzing, deer-in-the-headlights stage fright. I guess as you grow up you become a little inured to that particular pain,” Sylvie says. “Or there’s so much other pain it gets put in perspective.” Starting at the deep end, she performed solo at SXSW, going on to play a number of shows under the radar with celebrated guest musicians.

Late last year, in a gap between tours, Howe lured Sylvie to the desert where they recorded live to tape in Wavelab Studio in Tucson, with Thoger Lund playing upright bass and Howe, who produced the album, backing her brilliantly on guitar, synthesizers, and piano. “I was staying in Tucson in a motel with no car, running alongside the freeway in the hot morning sun, and then we just went into the cool, dark studio and played. No rehearsals and no going back. It was magic. We planned to record ten of my songs, including a couple I’d just written. We ended up with twelve: one spontaneous cover, and an instrumental with all of us gathered around Howe’s piano, which sounds like the soundtrack to a lost David Lynch film.”

It’s apt that the album should be made in such a musically evocative setting, because another love affair that informs the record is that of Sylvie and the USA. Born in London, she’d felt the pull of America since childhood and ran away to LA in the late seventies to write about music, convinced she’d never have the nerve to perform it. She became renowned as a rock writer (she’s the subject of a BBC documentary, The Rock Chick) and also as an acclaimed author. Her books include the cult fiction Too Weird For Ziggy and biographies Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes and I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. Following numerous movements across the globe—including three years in a tumbledown French chateau—she now lives in San Francisco.

“The main constant in my life, aside from escape, has been music,” Sylvie says, “writing about it in public and playing it in secret, until now.” On her intimate, mesmerizing debut she lays herself bare. “These are true songs and this is how they came out, alone in the dead of night, sweet, sad and mysterious.”

Second album Blue on BlueOut now on Compass Records

Listen here

SYLVIE SIMMONS - BLUE ON BLUE

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Second album Blue on Blue
Out now on Compass Records