He doesn’t need the guidance. Farewell, My Sweet Alibi is his first product of ProTools hermitage, a daedal composition he spent months obsessively tinkering with in his pajamas. “Feeling comfortable at home, not watching the clock, just being able to be totally relaxed — I think allowed me to get exactly what I wanted.” He says he mostly writes in flashes on the bus, on the train, on the street. In this case, he knew exactly how he wanted to embellish those epiphanies, which is why he stopped collaborating with the Symptoms, who’d been on his last record, Almost . . . All the Way . . . Down (2003). “I just had a really clear idea of what I wanted and that didn’t leave much room for the two other people. I didn’t want it to sound terribly ‘singer-songwriter’ — I wanted to avoid sounding like a folked-up sap.”
“Folked-up sap” implies histrionic treacle; Simmons’s songs are emotive but in that universal pop sense. Love is a wager (“Lovely Liar”); hearts teeter-totter like playground equipment ( “See Saw Heart”), and they come with damage-ready diagrams (“Blueprints,” which casts heartbreak in architectural terms against a 12-string guitar jangle à la the Byrds). “Paperweight” is a wistful, airy, carpe-diem-reverie-turned-stationery-supply metaphor over an e-bow shudder. But those themes say more about the record’s mood than its mission: at most points, the lyrical symbols are secondary to the layered song structures. In “Tall Tales,” Simmons toys with shifting tempi, segueing from a percussive trot to a church-organ drone to a trilling tone that seems squeezed out of a dolphin’s blowhole. Such abrupt transitions, he explains, “were a big thing for me — like a Brian Wilson Smile thing — it’s all fragmented. It kind of seems like, ‘What the hell just happened?’ Like somebody bumped the machine while it was recording.”
Farewell’s dénouement is the title track, in which Simmons reckons with turning 30, dolefully serenading his 20s as if they were victims of a forced break-up. That goodbye is the finale because, “If I lose my arms in a car accident or something like that, I’ll be happy that I made this record.”
JEFFREY SIMMONS + PINOCCHIO SYNDROME | July 5 | Middle East upstairs, 472 Mass Ave, Cambridge | 18-plus | $8 | 617.864.EAST
