Peg Simone

Peg Simone is based out of NYC. Her recent release "Secrets from the Storm" on Radium/Table of the Elements is a unique collaboration between Peg Simone and writer Holly Anderson. Poetic shards of raw-knuckled memoir are inspired by everything from the Harry Crews novel "The Gospel Singer" to Memphis Minnie. The epic opener "Levee/1927", a collaboration between Peg & Jonathan Kane, in which Jonathan Kane masterfully arranged, goes far beyond its sources, by turns furtive and brutal, as if the Velvet Underground had taken Albert King as a mentor instead of Andy Warhol. Peg Simone also plays guitar in Jonathan Kane's February.

“This is the stuff, so rare and lovely in its haunting resonance, that should be heard, that must be heard, while breath is still in us to be transported and to feel.” –Nick Tosches

“Heightened by the epic baptismal immersion of “Levee / 1927,” Peg Simone sing-speaks ghostly and shadowy narratives from the alluvial marshes of the human flood-plain.” –Lenny Kaye

“A lot of new music boasts of a good time, but it ends up being the same caffeinated sugar water in a fancy plastic bottle, completely lacking in nutrients, life, and anything that’s good for you. Peg Simone’s new music begins from pure places like poetry, the spoken word, the human breath, feedback, the mystical side of folk and blues, and the effect is icy water coming off the mountain, tasting of soil, rock and organic matter; you want to drink it and let it drip down your neck. –Black Francis

“It’s that damp, febrile atmosphere of the lowland South that singer and guitarist Peg Simone evokes in her recent release, Secrets from the Storm. Well-timed for a season of natural and man-made calamity, Simone employs an electric and slide-guitar folk/blues palette to color tales of the marginal and lost, the pushed- too-far who take one more blow to the chest ... ‘Levee/1927’ combines the Memphis Minnie account with a catalogue of detritus and death. At first exhaled as much as sung, the 22-minute meditation builds from spare guitar echoes to insistent slide feedback … the desperation comes from having nowhere left to go, knowing that there isn’t a better place just up the highway, no boxcar ride to a better tomorrow. Where the Great Depression was a restless time with millions of jobless Americans on the move, the songs of our Great Recession may gasp out our shock at being utterly stuck. No way to sell, no place to go.” –No Depression

“‘Levee/1927’ starts with [Simone’s] trademark bed of impressionistic, ringing guitars, and it slowly, almost imperceptibly, grows into a fragile blues stomp that re-imagines parts of Led Zeppelin as well as the old blues standards from which Jimmy Page loved to borrow. The subtle and brilliant music drives home feelings of loss and nostalgia, of devastation and, just maybe, a slight glimmer of hope.” –Pop Matters “

Peg Simone has put a remarkable avant-garde spin on the blues, collaborating with writer Holly Anderson and fellow Table of the Elements star Jonathan Kane … you might draw parallels with other greats such as Loren Connors or John Fahey. Radical and poetic … Inspired” –Boomkat.com

“An eerie mesh of whispered secrets, spectral slides, and detuned dissonance … a stunning conflation of Delta heat and No Wave cool, it reminded you at once of Jimmy Page and Sonic Youth. Peg Simone is one hell of a blues guitar player.” –VenusZine

“Peg Simone has managed to find herself in the company of some of [our] favorite current musical heroes — Oren Ambarchi, Rhys Chatham, John Fahey, Tony Conrad, Fennesz, Thurston Moore, Stephen O'Malley.” –Tiny Mix Tapes

“Death and disaster stalk the songs of Peg Simone. Expansive blues narratives, they dwell in an America of crumbling homesteads and desperate drunks waiting for the next tornado to hit.” –Uncut

“A bold, devastating reinvention, with hard-boiled vignettes that match verbal swerve to nova flashes of slide guitar and heavy black clouds of ambient fuzz.” –Time Out Chicago

“Simone’s husky, smoke-yellowed voice acts a tour guide on a slow riverboat through the muddy Mississippi deep into the heart of Southern darkness.” –Slug Magazine

“It takes brass ovaries to open your debut with a 22-minute meditation on a mother and child felled by floodwaters, but the gamble pays off.” –Philadelphia Citypaper

“Oozes ectoplasmic blues from every haunted pore.” –Exclaim! “Sinister and foreboding … Epic.” –The Big Takeover