Longtime readers of this blog will know that I’ve been friends with Timothy Simmons for decades, so I was excited, as always, to hear that he’d recorded a new album. In the past, he’s collaborated with a wide range of musicians, but with his latest album, Spirit in the Storm, he’s playing all of the instruments. To find out more, I dropped him a line…

I’ve lost track. How many have you put out so far?
This is album number 5!

What inspired this one?
A few years ago, I was diagnosed with a genetic heart disease called Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy. It runs through my mother’s side of the family. In fact, both my mother and my grandmother died from it in their fifties. Since that time, there have been a lot of advances in medicine, and it’s all under control, but still, being diagnosed with the same disease that killed my mother was a pretty difficult thing to experience. So, I started writing. I wrote a story about a teenage girl named Fern who has been diagnosed with the same heart disease that her mother has. In the story, she undergoes a transcendental experience, where her spirit visits her in a dream. In this dream, Fern and the spirit, named Koru, go on a road trip, and Koru teaches Fern how to write a song. The story goes back and forth between Fern’s experience with Koru, and her daily experiences living with a sick parent, managing a heart condition, and playing in a punk rock band with her friends named Food.

Throughout the story, Fern and Koru discuss song lyrics that Fern has written for which she cannot find the melody. One by one, Koru helps Fern find the melody for each of her songs. The songs on this album are those songs. They are all written from Fern’s perspective. They explore different aspects of what music means to her, what inspires her to sing, and what she struggles with a young person who has experienced trauma. Ultimately, I am Fern, and these songs and this story are the method I have used to process my own life experiences.

A while back, you were telling me that allowing mistakes to happen is a part of your creative process. What are some mistakes that you allowed to happen this time around? 
Oh man, this album is riddled with mistakes! My songwriting process has grown out of a daily practice of improvising. Starting with one sound, I build simple improvisations, mostly on guitar, Some of the songs on this album are built out of those recordings. There are two short instrumentals – Heat Lightning and Pray for Rain. These are both fully improvised. Heat Lightning is a free-form guitar piece to which I added some synths. Pray for Rain was recorded live on a lap steel guitar using an Electro-Harmonix Freeze Pedal and a Line 6 DL4 Looper and Delay Pedal. I went in and added some piano later. Each of those pieces have lots of mistakes that I left in.

In addition, the songs, A Place Among the Stones and Ballad of the Open Sea also use unedited guitar improvisations as the foundation. For each song, I recorded the acoustic guitar parts completely improvised and in one take, and then added the other instruments and melodies later. Again, those songs include lots of mistakes that tried to cover with distortion! And, even though the other songs are more composed, I feel like we spend too much time trying to make things sound perfect, and so I tried to limit myself to only one or two takes for each song. Often, I write the song on guitar, so when I add the bass, drums, vocals, and other instruments, those parts are typically improvised on the spot, and whatever I play in the first one or two takes is what I go with. I feel like it’s better not to overthink. This way, my music is a more authentic expression.

Your last album, Friends Meeting, was a collection of collaborations. Did you work with anyone on Spirit in the Storm?
Nope. It’s all me on this one. I play all the instruments, and sing all the parts myself. I also did all the mixing and mastering as well. Some dude named Marc Schuster did the amazing cover art, though.

Do you have any plans to perform the album live?
I went into this project planning to write simple songs that could be recreated live. Then I went and improvised half of it and added, in some cases, five or six other instrumental parts. So, at this point, I’m not sure how realistic it is that I’ll be playing these songs out live anytime soon. Having said that, I have been practicing them as solo guitar and vocal pieces in the hopes that, someday, I can play them in front of an audience. Until then, I’ll keep practicing!

You also play drums in Riverside. Anything new going on with them?
We’re working on new music! We have about ten new songs that we are currently recording in the hopes of releasing a new album in the next year or so. Or it could be longer. We work very slowly! We are also playing some shows soon. We’ll be opening for The Ocean Blue at the Ardmore Music Hall on December 5th, 2025, and we’ll be at Philamoca in the new year final date TBD.

What other projects are you currently working on? 
Well, I hope to self-publish the story that this album is based on. And I am also reconnecting with some local musicians in the Music for People/Improvisation community and will hopefully be creating some new music with those folks in the new year. I have also been intermittently playing drums in a Vince Guaraldi cover band. He wrote the music for the Peanuts cartoons. It sounds really nerdy, but the songs are super fun to play. If you only know Linus and Lucy, check out Cast Your Fate to the Wind. It’s a beautiful piece, and it grooves hard. That band took a hiatus for a few years, but we are starting to play together again, and so hopefully we’ll be doing some gigs in the new year as well!

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!
Of course, Marc! I truly appreciate you spreading the word about Spirit in the Storm. I’m really proud of it, and hope lots of folks enjoy it.