Will Simmons For Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

Jesus Christ! In these apocalyptic times I often find myself calling out for Jesus. This time it’s because I’ve had another request for liner notes. I should be honored but I’m cranky and pandemic. But you aren’t paying good money to hear me complain. It’s not like I have better things to do. I do have to watch Big Brothers All-Stars only because I’m plotting to kill them all. The music distracts me. I would change the title of this recording to Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. Simmons would be cooking all day and I would sit talking about Moby Grape. I need the whole story. I would wait for fresh vegetables knowing Simmons sings to his plants.

Sometimes Will Simmons takes over my life. Put the music on and transcend. Spacewalk into a Simmons’ solar system of sorts. Metaphorically, the musical notes are twinkling stars fading and dying as they’re replaced by new ones. The songs orbit like planets around the sun. Intergalactic synth riffs mingle with sputtering, bent note guitar lines, a soundtrack to the-end-of-the-world nature of our current lives. I refuse to get worked up. People say I refuse to work. This ain’t working. This is listening and scribbling. Thoughts become words that dissolve into pictures. Simmons has a cinematic style. Sometimes it’s blasts of surrealistic poetry; other times screenplay direction. You go where he takes you eventually forgetting the fear that your spacewalk tether will snap and you’ll float into another galaxy.

I get a vision. It’s Simmons roaming the streets of Pittsburgh at night. Night is a constant theme in his work. He’s like a sexy vampire. Pittsburghers have their version of sexy. The laws of nature remind me that all vampires are sexy. Simmons roams hard, covers territory, consumes images of the Virgin Mary and feasts on graffiti. Scribbled lines rope him into a misty predawn dream state. I wouldn’t be surprised if he howled at the moon a time or two. These aspirations get translated, refined, edited, and distilled as they mutate into music. They’re the spice in Simmons’ sauce. He’s taken care of the hard part--hunkering down, composing and arranging. Instruments offer vibrant guitar tone, warbly synth notes, and the sometime use of Super Bowl Shuffle hip hop beats—a jarring homage that dissipates as the songs mutate.

If this goes over your head that’s all right. There’s so much to understand. Not much about the creative process makes sense. It’s work and trial and error. Mostly, Simmons leaves out the errors. You want to over analyze, hang your whole opinion on an out of sync drum bleep? That’s shallow. This isn’t a shallow pool. It’s deep. I suspect Simmons’ has bathed at Baxter’s. His psychedelic overtones aren’t extreme but he does have the twisting and turning arrangements that probably weren’t inspired by an old 60’s album.

Fans will love this recording. It’s classic Simmons that leaps out of the box from time to time. I love the crap out of this guy. It’s making me want to take up the pen name B. M. Hunter. I offered to let Simmons sing his own praises in a large font as a liner note nod to everyone’s hero Ted Nugent, who luckily has been rather quiet lately. Simmons declined and made me write this instead. He’s modest and that’s nice. As luck would have it, I’m out of here.

Pen drop!

Quayle Smitters, August, 2020
Coming at you from a quarantine quagmire!