"2015, and the silence has been broken with Simple Songs. JIM O’ROURKE is ready to talk to you again. First, he wants you to know he’s not dead—yet. But you’re not, either—and really, what have you done lately? Certainly not made your first pop album since 2001—and even if you had, it probably wasn’t any good. Meanwhile Simple Songs is more than just a first of anything since whenever! It’s an amazing record of musical song entertainment—because Jim O’Rourke knows what he wants and how to get it.—musically, that is. The rest of the world is still a mystery and a bottomless source of aggravation for the old boy. What do we care? We get a great new album out of it. Yes, Simple Songs is an album of songs sung by Jim O’Rourke all the way through! It has been ten years since Jim’s voice rang out from a new album. What Simple Songs sounds like.... At this point, the range of sounds and songs that have turned Jim’s head are numerous enough to have crushed together into something that is unmistakably his—the vast, glossy and glittering O’Rourkian (yes, like Kervorkian) wall of sound. The music’s got OCD quality, played so immaculately by so many instruments, and most of them by the creator’s hand. This time’s really the widest screen yet for Jim’s popular song-style, truly breathtaking!"

Drag City, 2015