Mark Sims fills new album Take Me Faster with references to a planet and people struggling with endless wars and an economic system that continues to bleed the lower and middle classes, making daily survival an ongoing struggle. And yet, at its core, there remains a sense that a better future is worth fighting for, with Sims repeatedly finding respite in the small circle of friends and family in which he moves.
“I could work a million hours/and still be broke when I die,” he sings on the meditative “Hold on to Me,” and then pivots. “So I may as well have a good time/Spend it with the ones I love.”
“It’s very hard to not want to base everything off the global situation,” Sims said in a late June interview. “But for me, I spend most of my time at home with my wife and kids, and it’s important to remember I have my most immediate impact on my family and the people around me and who I work with. … Going back, I’ve tried to write songs about bigger issues. I tried for months to write a George Floyd song and I couldn’t find a way to talk about it that felt valuable or needed. But I have no problem writing about the things I’m actually doing, like my relationship with my wife or watching my kids grow up.”
This sense of intimacy carries throughout Take Me Faster, out now digitally on Carousel Horse Records/Old 3-C Label Group, with Sims taking measured stock of his surroundings against a fingerpicked musical backdrop steeped heavily in folk, country and acoustic blues.
Sims said the personal reassessment that takes place within this particular batch of songs stemmed in part from him entering into a period of intense transformation. A mason by trade, Sims is in the early stages of a career change brought about by the unrelentingly physical nature of the work (he cited a bad hip and two hernias in addition to surgeries on both his wrist and shoulder) and the increasingly harsh economic realities of the profession, in which wages haven’t kept pace with inflation. At the same time, his home life is undergoing a shift, with one child about to depart for college and the other only a year behind.
“To think that one of us is moving out is pretty exciting and kind of intense,” said Sims, who added that part of the desire to better assess where he fits surfaced in these songs is residual from the loss of his parents, who passed away within a year of one another about five years back. “Whether I write about it directly or indirectly, I’m still trying to process the death of my parents and the reality that there’s no older person who’s there in my life to help me. And that’s something that I think about it all of the time, because things will be changing in the world, or some piece of art or culture will come out, and I’ll think to myself, ‘Oh, I want to talk to my dad about this.’ … I’m still trying to replace this sort of conversation I would have with my parents about the world. I guess I wasn’t ready for that to be over just yet.”
And so, these conversations have instead carried into Sims’ music, with the singer, songwriter and guitarist making observations that begin in his front yard (he watches cars roll by on “Sitting on the Porch”) and then expand leagues outward. Witness “This Beautiful World,” a darker turn informed by the unrelenting violence currently unfolding in both Gaza and Ukraine.
Though shaped by his perspective, Sims rarely takes centerstage in his narratives. Rather, he embraces his standing as a way to begin to untangle his surroundings, transforming memories of a long-shuttered Columbus dive into a reflection on the relentless nature of change (“The Blue Dube”) and expanding the sense of entrapment he feels navigating the capitalist system into a bigger picture view of the growing class divide (“Sitting on the Porch”). On the latter, the musician gradually progresses from a series of personal reflections (“I’m trapped inside a system”; “I don’t feel free”) into something infinitely more outward looking. “How can someone justify holding onto so much gold?” the musician sings. “While other folks are hungry and living out in the cold?”
“I don’t need to rework it to be the hero of my own story all the time, if that makes sense,” Sims said. “I think that could be a byproduct of age, and it’s definitely a byproduct of being a dad. Most of what I’m doing in my life is getting my kids set up for something. Like right now, I’m doing all of this stuff with FAFSA and student loans for my kids. … And then, in our society, getting older does push you off to the side. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is another conversation. But just by being in my mid-40s and raising kids, if I didn’t step back, it would feel weird to me.”
Currently, Sims said he is working to try and find similar contentment within his chosen creative space, acknowledging that he has long struggled to reconcile a desire to find commercial success with the sense of personal release that comes from making music. “I am actively trying to work on that, because one of my shortcomings is that I have a hard time separating the joy I get in playing music from the business of ‘making it,’” said Sims, who traced this mental gulf back through his early days playing in the Tough and Lovely. “But I have to divorce myself from that idea, because I keep ruining my own experience by focusing on things I can’t control. I am trying very hard now just to make the best music I can and to enjoy it for that.”
