‘Motherland’ was released in 2014, and contains eight previously unreleased original songs, as well as three acoustic re-workings of tracks from Tinyfish and Shineback. Spanning twenty years of songwriting and featuring some extremely personal lyrics, the album also saw Simon being reunited with long-time writing partner Rob Ramsay (who co-wrote three of the songs and provided some spoken word and harmonica). This was the first album released by Simon under his own name, and as well as having no band name to hide behind he has also stripped back the instrumentation so that often it is just acoustic guitar and his voice. Mind you, I think he would have done even better if he had also left out the drum machine that annoyingly appears here and there.
There is a mixture of self-reflection emotion and numbers that contain more poppy and melodic elements, and the result is an album that is reminiscent of the Seventies while also being right up to date. It isn’t all picking and gentleness, there are chords strummed and voices raised, and the result is something that I really enjoyed. His vocals are more delicate than, say, Ian Anderson, and he probably has more in common with Rog Patterson and Nigel Mazlyn Jones, and it is the bringing together of many different styles in a fully open style that makes this so endearing. This is an album that does appreciate being played quite loudly so that nothing from the real world can break into it. Of the three albums of his I have listened to recently, this is the favourite.
