An Evening and Glimpse into the Life of Sylvie Simmons

Written by Alexa LoSchiavo. Photo by Trinity Ray.

People start trickling in through the big white doors of the Arnold Auditorium before the show starts, slow but steady. Sylvie Simmons stands with her back to the audience of four or so (so far) testing her ukulele before the show, in a black velvet blazer with her silver hair in two pigtails. It makes for a rather picturesque image, her standing on the stage, playing and humming to get the ukulele in tune.

She occupies some sort of mythic space, even in these tiny halls; the way her writing has changed the course of music, the trends she’s observed fluctuate and disappear, change and fall. She seems to keep the core of it all despite watching all these changes, not becoming subdued by the many genres and voices she’s seen come and go but instead filling the room with a gentle connection as she laughs about her many stories in between songs. 

Sylvie Simmons is a London-born, California-based rock journalist and singer/ songwriter. She has been a widely regarded and highly respected rock journalist since the 70s, with a list of accolades that are a mile long and an influence that keeps growing. She wrote the famous biography of Leonard Cohen, “I’m Your Man,” among many other biographies of significant musicians such as Johnny Cash, Neil Young, etc. She also visited SCAD this week, not only to spend an evening playing and recounting her music but also to give advice to emerging writing students starting their careers.  

Simmons started her glittering career in music journalism by writing for “Sounds,” a UK-based rock magazine. She moved to LA in her early 20s from London to become a US correspondent for “Sounds” at a rather young age. One of her first major assignments was going on the road with Black Sabbath, who she described as “really sweet” to the emerging media writing class. During her first years in LA, she interviewed people who live in infamy now, including AC/DC, Rod Stewart, Stevie Nicks, Blondie and Michael Jackson. 

To characterize Simmons the way she characterized so many of these names is a hard task. Her energy fills the room, and her advice lingers because she describes her life with such vivacity, painting an image of her as a young woman in the music publishing industry. She describes the grit it took to get into the industry, recounting the times she’s walked out of interviews and the times she’s been hit on by artists she’d always respected. As a young woman in a male-dominated industry, writing about mainly male rock bands or artists and pushing through the walls that surrounded her was no small task. But her endurance paid off, and eventually, that stamina was rewarded. She describes the moment that she realized she didn’t have to be harsh and have such thick skin, describing the shift in her perspective when she reconnected with a female artist she’d written about long ago. She “realized she wasn’t trying to outdo the boys anymore like what was required at first,” as she gained more recognition in the industry and realized all the women she was connected to and supported by. 

She talks about her music in a similar way, vivacious and poignant, yet full of many years of experience, as an accordion plays her onto the stage. Her words leave imprinted images in one’s mind, painting a picture of herself writing in San Francisco on a red sofa with a bottle of wine. She leads us into her song “My Lips Still Taste of You,” describing the feeling of the “space between what we need and what we settle for.” Her music is reminiscent of a female Leonard Cohen, soulful and sweet, with touching, simple lyrics that cut deep. She’s accompanied by two other musicians: Jared Hall, accordionist (whom she’s known for a while) and Andrew Sovine, guitarist. 

She follows this song by describing her introduction to music, recounting old Beatles vinyl that her brothers tried to steal, and then she describes the feeling most music lovers get when called to a specific artist. She talks about the first time she listened to Leonard Cohen and how that record “picked (her) up and threw (her) against the wall.” It started her innate feeling that she needed to write her own music. And that feeling she felt so long ago in her bedroom as a child listening to a Leonard Cohen vinyl on repeat is captured so well in her work today. It seems that we write the kind of music we’re inspired by if we’re lucky. 

Throughout the performance, she talks about overcoming her fear of playing music in order to be with us here today. She describes being a young teenager at a pub in London with only a few local drunks on stools and how she got up on the stage and couldn’t sing one note. She switched to writing about music because she felt she couldn’t perform it. In the years before writing Leonard Cohen’s biography and writing her own music, she wrote hundreds of interviews and articles during the punk and heavy metal movement, one of the first to bring artists such as Motley Crue and Guns N’ Roses to international attention. She went on to co-author the first book on Motley Crue, “Lude, Crude, and Rude,” with rock author Malcolm Dome. 

One of the defining things about Sylvie Simmons is not only that she forged a space for herself and other female music journalists to encompass but that she moved towards what moved her. She wrote about the French pop movement and Serge Gainsbourg, she wrote rock-related short fiction, and she inaugurated MOJO’s “Americana” column to expose independent roots music by new artists. She consistently occupied spaces that she was drawn to, and that’s what makes her writing so important and powerful. Her list of essays, accolades, biographies and influence are miles long because she moved towards what inspired her. She described in Emerging Media how she would look through other interviews to get the questions that weren’t being asked, moving through journalism in a way that made her writing unique, specific and needed. 

But her favorite moment of her career was interviewing her idol, Leonard Cohen himself, to write his infamous biography “I’m Your Man.” As she plays his music on stage, she talks about this experience, saying, “It’d felt like his music had come to (her) personally.” She spent three years writing his biography and then more touring it. Simmons has a quality about her writing: an ability to fully encompass the characteristics of a person in a few simple words. Her work on Cohen’s biography is described as a new “gold standard,” according to the LA Times. More personally, she talks about how touring for Leonard Cohen’s biography got her over her fear of performing because she felt it was easier to perform someone else’s music. 

Throughout her set, she invites you into her life effortlessly and happily, just like she does with her journalism. She talks about the chords she made up to play her songs, her new genre of punk ukelele coined “puke,” her song “Keep Dancing” played at the Makeout Room in San Francisco and the couple who fought to her music. She creates a space you don’t want to leave, making room for herself amongst the legends she interviewed, a singer/songwriter to write home about. She plays us out with a goodbye song and lingers on the last note before the crowd erupts in claps. Her concert fills the spaces between each of us, and when the floor opens for questions, hands slowly shoot up. 

She’s asked about her favorite artists to interview, to which she answers Leonard Cohen, closely followed by Johnny Cash. She’s asked how she knows her words are a song or a poem, to which she replies, “They let you know,” (they) being the words she writes. She describes the joy that comes from playing with any kind of instrument on the stage, describing playing with multitudes while touring, such as string quartets, basses, etc. Simmons leaves us recognizing her as someone who has always loved music in its many forms, and it’s incredibly inspiring to see her transition from writing about others’ music to writing and performing her own music. 

As the show ends and Simmons walks off the stage, there seems to be a feeling of glee that paces through everyone. While Simmons’ life and work are inspiring enough, this evening with her and her ukulele seemed to relinquish the crowd into a world of her own making, flush with stories that are tangled in her life of interviewing others and her infectious way of seeing the world. Simmons leaves us thinking about the importance of following our passions, writing our own stories and going toward what moves us as much as we can.