event

The Southgate House Revival - Revival Room
Wed February 28, 2018 8:00 pm (7:30 pm DOORS)

SIMO, Brass Owl

$18.00
SIMO

SIMO announce the release of new studio album ‘Rise & Shine’ on 15 September 2017 on Provogue. 

On Rise & Shine SIMO widens their sound and is filled with slow-smoked soul ballads, psychedelic desert-rock instrumentals, hard-edged, bluesy barn burners and Stax-worthy funk rockers. 

Rise & Shine, SIMO’s new album, widens their sound, as the band stretched beyond preconceived notions and produced a nuanced record reflecting their views, talents and ultimately their growth. 

The album began taking shape on the road, where SIMO’s three bandmates — singer, 

guitarist and namesake frontman JD Simo; drummer Adam Abrashoff; and bassist Elad Shapiro 

— spent most of 2016 on tour. They played 215 shows that year, leaving behind their Nashville 

headquarters and traveling to nine different countries in support of their Billboard Top 10 blues 

album, Let Love Show the Way. The trio worked on new music along the way, hashing out 

chord changes in hotel rooms and tweaking song arrangements during soundcheck. It was a 

time of growth and self-improvement for everyone, and they became better friends, better 

musicians, and better people. At the same time, the outside world was changing. Political pundits 

were screaming at one another. Elections were pitting candidate against candidate, party 

against party, neighbour against neighbour. The need to write music that truly meant something 

— music that not only demonstrated the band’s explosive chops, but also sent a clear 

message — was greater than ever. 



“This is an album about change,” says Elad, who joined the band in 2015. “We looked at 

what’s been happening in our own lives, as well as what’s been happening in the world. 

Everyone is changing: personally, politically, socially. We’ve seen it. We’ve felt it. And we’re 

writing about it.” 



Rise & Shine introduces the band’s elastic, expanded sound, which blurs the lines between 

genres and generations throughout the album’s 11 tracks. SIMO’s previous release, Let Love 

Show the Way, was a spot-on salute to the band’s rock & roll influences, full of big amplifiers, 

vintage vibe, and plenty of volume. Rise & Shine doesn’t ignore those roots, but it pushes 

toward something new. Eager to explore uncharted territory, the guys make room for 

slow-smoked soul ballads (“I Want Love”); psychedelic desert-rock instrumentals (“The 

Climb”); hard-edged, bluesy barn burners (“Light the Candle”); and Stax-worthy funk rockers 

(“Meditation”). Gluing everything together is the charisma and chemistry of three musicians 

who spent more than 300 days together last year, mastering the art not only of nodding to the 

past, but looking ahead to the future too. 



“If you go through my record collection and look at the more contemporary titles,” JD explains, 

“you’ll see the Roots, Wilco, Alabama Shakes, and Ryan Adams. I listen to a lot of old soul 

music, too. Isaac Hayes. Funkadelic. Bob Dylan. On Rise & Shine, I was just trying to cull from 

the vastness that is my normal music diet, and not trying to pander to some target that was 

easy to hit.” 



SIMO began recording Rise & Shine in February 2017, producing the album themselves (with 

help from engineer Don Bates) in Nashville’s House of Blues Studio D. They moved at their 

own deliberate pace, taking more than a month to record the album. 



“There was a lot more sonic experimentation going on,” remembers Adam. “Every track has a 

different sonic imprint,” JD adds. “We took great care to make each track’s sonic identity match 

the mood of the song. Even though that meant starting from scratch every day with how the 

studio was setup.” 



They pulled long hours, too, arriving around 3:00 p.m. every day and staying until 6:00 in the 

morning. 



“There are certain records that stick out in my mind as sounding like they were made in the 

middle of the night,” says JD, who remembers recording the song “Be With You” in a single 

take at 5:15 a.m. “When Frank Sinatra sings “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” to 

me it sounds like 2:00 am. Bob Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” sounds like 3:00 or 

4:00 in the morning. There were certain songs of ours that I knew would benefit from that 

nighttime feel, where you’re up and working while the rest of the world is asleep.” 



A former session guitarist who’s played on nearly 500 albums, JD didn’t take Rise & Shine’s 

lengthy creation process for granted. “I’ve never worked on a record that took this long to 

record,” he adds. “I was so grateful to have that opportunity.” 



Impassioned vocals that call to mind Prince or Al Green; Rhythm tracks inspired by the fatback 

swagger of Isaac Hayes and funky spirit of D’Angelo; Lush, highly detailed sonic landscapes 

reminiscent of Pink Floyd; Raw, naked songwriting that lifts the veil for the listener to see all the 

frailty and ugly parts as well as the beautiful: Rise & Shine makes room for it all, with SIMO 

looking not to recreate old sounds, but invent new ones. It’s the band’s most expansive album 

to date — the work of a band at its curious, adventurous peak.

Brass Owl