Jonathan Stephen Simons discusses his record, Time Flows Like Water.
🎙️ Episode Summary
In this episode, host Tim Smal sits down with Jonathan Stephen Simons, the frontman of the South African indie/folk trio, to discuss their sophomore album, Time Flows Like Water. Released on November 14th, 2025 via Popup Records, this record is the culmination of two years of intentional collaboration with drummer Ray Adam Morgan and bassist Stephen de Souza.
Jonathan opens up about the journey from his debut album to this new release, describing the recording process in his Kommetjie home studio and the philosophy of “channeling” lyrics rather than writing them. We dive deep into the stories behind standout tracks like I’ll Wait For It and Man Before, exploring themes of masculinity, spirituality, and the pressure of productivity in the modern world.
Whether you are a musician interested in self-production and alternate tunings, or a listener looking for music that explores the human condition, this conversation offers a beautiful look into the mind of an artist in his flow state.
🗝️ Key Takeaways
- The Art of Letting Go: Jonathan discusses the meaning behind the album title, Time Flows Like Water, which serves as a personal mantra about accepting life’s currents rather than reacting emotionally to every obstacle.
- Productivity vs. Worth: In a standout segment, Jonathan breaks down the concept of the “Midnight Wasteland”—the quiet hours between 1:00 AM and 3:30 AM—and how he learned that his worth as a human is not defined by his productivity in a corporate sense.
- Home Studio Magic: The entire album was recorded in a small room in Kommetjie. Jonathan shares how a non-soundproofed room can still produce magic if the energy is right, referencing Jack White’s philosophy: “Everything crazy starts in a small room.”
- Sonic Architecture: Guitarists will love the breakdown of Jonathan’s setup. He reveals his use of Tanglewood and Ibanez acoustics tuned down a full step (Standard-D and DADGAD-C) to create the album’s deep, resonant vibration.
⏱️ Chapter Markers
- [00:00] Intro: Welcome to the show & the release of Time Flows Like Water.
- [00:44] How Tim discovered the band at The Sound Garden (Imhoff Farm).
- [01:20] The two-year journey of making the album & partnering with a German label.
- [02:09] I’ll Wait For It: A song about patience in relationships.
- [03:05] Evolution: How this differs from the debut, To Change The Weather.
- [06:51] Production: Recording in a Kommetjie home studio & the “small room” philosophy.
- [08:11] Man Before: Discussing fatherhood, manhood, and the lyric “Love is all that we are.”
- [10:15] Midnight Wasteland: Finding peace in being different and the trap of productivity.
- [12:17] The Balancing Act: Running “All We Are” (audio post-production) while being an artist.
- [13:25] Future Plans: Touring Germany, finding booking agents, and the dream of Kirstenbosch.
- [15:53] The Artwork: Combining painting and photography to create depth.
- [18:11] Visual Storytelling: The community effort behind the music videos.
- [22:11] Gear Talk: Lower tunings and acoustic guitar choices.
- [24:19] Outro: Upcoming shows and where to find the music.
🗨️ Memorable Quote
“We know nowadays, [productivity] is not the truth. We’re worth our actions and our beliefs and our morals. Our productivity simply enables us to have a tool to live a life.” — Jonathan Stephen Simons
🔗 Links
- Buy the Album: Jonathan Stephen Simons on Bandcamp
- Watch the Videos: Check out Midnight Wasteland, Man Before, and Growing Pains on YouTube.
- Follow on Socials: Search for Jonathan Stephen Simons on Instagram and Facebook.
- Studio: All We Are (Jonathan’s boutique audio house).
📃 Transcript
Tim Smal [host]: Hi everyone and welcome to the show today. I’m thrilled to welcome the frontman of South African indie/folk trio, Jonathan Stephen Simons to the show. Their brand new album, Time Flows Like Water, just dropped on November 14th via Popup Records, and it’s the impressive result of two years of collaboration. The combined talents of Jonathan Simons on guitar and vocals, Ray Adam Morgan on drums and Stephen de Souza on bass have created a record that truly lives up to its name. Like a constantly flowing river, this album takes listeners on an unforgettable emotional current, exploring themes of reflection, pain and knowledge. Jonathan, welcome to the show.
Jonathan Stephen Simons [guest]: Thank you, thank you. What a lovely intro, dude. Thank you.
Tim [0:44]: Well, I’m very excited about the new album. We were just chatting off mic about how I first heard about your music. I was walking through the Imhoff Farm, I believe. And you were playing a show at The Sound Garden and I heard this beautiful music floating through the air, and I was trying to get a peek of who was playing because it was kinda difficult to see inside The Sound Garden.
Jonathan [1:04]: Yeah, it’s kinda tucked around the corner.
Tim [1:06]: Yeah, a very narrow entrance. But I saw the poster on the outside, and then I made sure to follow you online. So I’ve been listening to your music over the last couple of months and you’ve just released a brand new album, so yeah, tell me more about it.
Jonathan [1:20]: Oh man, Time Flows Like Water has been such an amazing journey. Two years of really dedicated work and definitely a step up in terms of how we as the musicians that play together and make music together. It was definitely a step up in the level of intention and self investment as well. That’s why we partnered with a German label as well, they’re good friends of mine. It all just kinda happened at the right time and I couldn’t be more happy with how it came out.
Tim [1:49]: Wonderful. Well, I want to just start off by chatting about my favorite song on the album because before the album came out, I was watching a few of your music videos online. And there’s a track called I’ll Wait For It, which has this beautiful riff on guitar and this awesome melody, so this has gotta be my favorite track on the album. Can you tell me more about it?
Jonathan [2:09]: So that’s actually probably the oldest song on the album as well. We’ve been playing that song for about three years now. There’s personal meanings, but the way that I write my lyrics is, I want it to be able to be interpreted for the listener to take their own meaning from it. But for me personally, in a loose term basis, it’s about the friendships and the relationships – be it family, friendships, love life. It’s about the relationships that… You reach a point where there’s not much more you can do to change the state of how things are now. And sometimes you have to just take your hands off the situation and go “You know, no matter what, I’ll be here when you figure things out. So I’ll wait for that.” Yeah.
Tim [2:51]: Great. Well, let’s talk a little bit about your songwriting process, because I believe this is your second full-length album after your debut that came out in August 2022. So how has your songwriting process evolved since the first album?
Jonathan [3:05]: Well, it’s been quite a journey. Ray, Steve and I have been playing together for a long time. The lyrics always kind of come from me, but that seems to be changing now as well as we move forward. The guys are getting more involved with lyric ideas and helping me structure songs.
But that first album I released, which was To Change The Weather, was very much… It was post COVID. And what COVID had done was, the lockdown and everything had hit the reset button on a lot of projects I was involved in. So we were building up momentum in old projects, other projects we were writing other music, I was playing in other bands. And we were starting to build up a lot of momentum and a lot of hype around it. But yeah, lockdown came on the day that there was a massive announcement coming from an international partner.
That album To Change The Weather, was a way of me rediscovering what I actually wanna do with music. And reconnecting with something I had lost track of, which was the drive, you know, the reason I do it, the reason I wanna write music and share music, which has always been about me using music to heal through stuff when I was younger and then wanting to provide that service for other people and thinking I can do it. So To Change The Weather was very much a discovery period and I treated it more like a full length EP than an album. So I did a lot of experimenting and Ray and Steve were only involved on about three songs each on that. So it wasn’t quite a full scale “Okay, we’re a band now.”
So coming into Time Flows Like Water about two years ago, I had been talking with Popup for about five years. We’ve had our first conversation in about, at the end of 2020 or something, and it was through a mutual friend of mine, Mark, that was helping us with an old bands press. And we had a meeting with Popup and the possibility came about that, there was a team in the European market that was keen and ready and interested to work with us. And that was a possibility that had only been presented to me in a very impersonal way before, so I didn’t feel comfortable with this level of self investment when I don’t really know the people.
So Time Flows Like Water was freedom, that’s what it was. I’ve never felt so easily driven and determined to see something out, and I’ve never felt such a weight of importance on how I do things, but not in a pressure sense. So the Time Flows Like Water writing was very much songs we were playing, ’cause we used to play a lot more shows. There’s unfortunately not a lot of venues in Cape Town nowadays that satisfy the best serving of our performance.
But the writing has always been the same. It’s always been, something personal happens in life. I don’t sit and write down like, “Oh, I need to write a song about this,” you know, it’s very much a… without sounding too airy-fairy, it’s very much a channeling, is how I see it. Because the songs just kinda come out in the heat of the emotion in the moment and it’s very journalistic for me. So there’s a lot of catharsis for me. And then that catharsis gets multiplied and amplified when the guys come in and immediately play the perfect thing. ‘Cause we’ve been playing together for about 10 years now, and I can write a song knowing that Steve and Ray are gonna serve it.
Tim [6:27]: Yeah. Well, the guys must be very proud of this album because you can really hear their influence on the different tracks. So if you look at a track like Beauty of My Age, for example, the drums sound absolutely incredible on that track from Ray. So let’s chat a little bit about how you actually recorded this album, because I believe it’s self recorded or self produced, but it sounds incredible.
Jonathan [6:51]: So I have been working in music studios for 11 years now. I used to do a bit of advertising work, pitching for ads. I’ve produced some super low-budget friend albums across the years. Just basically, it all felt like it wasn’t clear at the time, but it all is clear to me now that it was preparing me for this. So we recorded everything in the little studio that I’m sitting in now, which is my home studio in Kommetjie. I’ve landed very luckily here in Kommetjie, because a year after moving into this place and establishing a nice music room, getting the treatment in the room sounding good… it’s not fully soundproof, so it’s not like “recording-ready” and we had to work around noisy neighborhood environments. But it’s a great room with a great energy and like Jack White says, “Everything crazy starts in a small room.”
So I’ve been learning and prepping and discovering new ways to do things and understanding from my mistakes over the years, how I want to record things and what the best way is. With this album, I was surrounded by so many lovely people that were so happy to just lend me microphones and lend me advice and lend me their ear. So this album really has a lot of people’s love in it, which is – wow, that is so special to me. I couldn’t hope for more, really.
Tim [8:11]: Yeah, it’s an incredibly emotive album, and I wanted to reference the one track Man Before. I was listening to the whole record now on bandcamp.com and following along with the lyrics. And I just love this song, particularly when that line comes in where it says, “But love isn’t hard, it’s all that we are.” That point in the song just gave me goosebumps. Can we chat about this track and what it means to you?
Jonathan [8:34]: Yeah, so I’m turning 30 next year. It’s definitely been an interesting 15 years of coming into manhood. My parents’ relationship was kind of complicated and they separated early in my life and I didn’t see my dad much. And when I did see him, it was more of like a “fun dad” than a dad situation, you know what I mean? So Man Before is really about figuring out what it means to be a man. And the point that gave you goosebumps represents a shifting point in my personal spirituality, where I have discovered like a peace, knowing that everything is love. And so long as I’m in the world giving love out, I’m serving my purpose.
Tim [9:18]: Awesome. And I’d love to know how you go about writing your lyrics. Can you tell me a little bit more about… do you come up with the melody first on the guitar? Do you write the lyrics first? What’s your process in terms of music and lyrics?
Jonathan [9:29]: Well, it always starts with the guitar. Like I said earlier, most of the time I’m not looking to write a song when it happens. I’ll be going through something, I would’ve been slightly triggered by something or there’s something weighing on my mind at the back and I just have this frustrated feeling in my body until I pick up the guitar and start playing around. And then, when we’re in the thick of the emotion and the thick of the feeling of the day-to-day, it’s really easy to understand what part of the guitar is making you feel good. So I’ll just tinker around, play around on different keys, different chords, eventually something will grab me that I’m playing. It won’t necessarily be like, “Oh, I’m gonna try and play this.” Like I said, it’s very spur of the moment, it’s very out of nowhere.
Tim [10:15]: Great. And I just love this video for Midnight Wasteland, it’s a very interesting video and a beautiful song. So I love how whenever I listen to any of your songs on the record they feel very authentic. So every song has got its own feel, and you can try to understand what it’s about by reading the lyrics. But what is this particular track about?
Jonathan [10:38]: Midnight Wasteland has such a special place in my heart, man. When you’re an artist in today’s day and age, and especially when I was growing up and the people around me, the role models around me, there was a lot of – it wasn’t necessarily their fault, but there was a lot of pressure on “your worth is your productivity,” right? And we know nowadays, that’s not the truth. We’re worth our actions and our beliefs and our morals. Our productivity simply enables us to have a tool to live a life, right?
So, Midnight Wasteland, for me, the midnight wasteland is like between 1:00 AM and 3:30 AM where I used to find a lot of peace. I’m a bit more of an early riser now, but I used to find a lot of peace in the quiet time at night. And the song is really about coming to terms with being different, coming to terms with being okay with not being productive in a conventional sense. I’m a busy guy, you know, I run a business All We Are, so I’ve found my productivity. But even to this day, it’s nothing like my friends that work 9 to 5’s. So Midnight Wasteland was about coming to terms with “Okay, my way of doing things is a little different. I’m not gonna beat myself up about it. I’m gonna thrive in this space, in this midnight wasteland, and I’m gonna make art.”
Tim [11:57]: Wow, it’s a very interesting concept because many of us have worked in corporate and we know the pressures of the working world. And you mentioned your business, which you’re running on top of doing this work. So can you maybe tell me a little bit about your business and what you do and how you manage to kind of bring the music side of things into it while doing all these different things?
Jonathan [12:17]: My company that I run is a boutique audio house. I do post-production, music production, mastering. So my day to day – which is why it felt so easy to get this album out and to spend so much time on it – my day to day is music. I live music, I don’t really do work other than music work. You know, I do voiceover stuff for people, I do assisted meditation stuff, I do music production, I do music for short films. I’m doing a TV show next year, I’m doing a full season of a TV show. It’s always been very music-centered and that’s why it’s allowed me the space to have this recording room, which enabled the album in the first place. ‘Cause if I didn’t have all this other stuff, bringing money in and keeping my life going, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this.
Tim [13:05]: Yeah, that’s amazing because you’re able to harness all of the learnings from your work in your day job and bring that into your creative work and you can hear it. I mean, the album is incredible, I’m sure it’s gonna do amazing things out there. But considering how busy that you are with all of your different projects, how are you gonna find the time to go on tour to Europe next year?
Jonathan [13:25]: With enough foresight and good planning. So we’re gonna be in Germany next year June, the three of us are going up. We’re waiting to hear back about some booking agency options over there. We’re actually currently looking for a booking agent in South Africa as well, because there’s not a lot of shows to go around in South Africa, and there’s this very specific type of show we’re trying to play to serve this album the best. So we’re trying to find someone here that can help us bridge that gap because, when you’re not represented by someone you don’t really get a lot of correspondence back and that’s not good.
But you can’t change the world in a day, so we’re trying to find ways to work around it. With enough foresight and enough planning, it will be easy because we’re working with the record label, because we’re tight with SAMRO. There’s funding options, there’s assisted funding, there’s a lot. You know, if you find yourself in the right conversations, there’s a lot of options to help you do things, but it’s about staying steady and strong and keeping yourself in these positions where you could get into these conversations.
Tim [14:26]: Absolutely, I could totally see you guys playing at Kirstenbosch Gardens and you’d go down really well, right?
Jonathan [14:32]: Oh, that’s a dream for sure. We hope that going to Germany and playing some festivals and some really nice shows in Germany, we hope that when we come back, people will take us a bit more seriously here. And Kirstenbosch is definitely something… Steve’s already – the bassist’s already played Kirstenbosch a couple times with Mandisi Dyantyis. But I would love to play Kirstenbosch, wow.
Tim [14:54]: I am sure your time will come. This new record of yours is… it’s definitely gonna make waves for you, excuse the pun. The name of the record is Time Flows Like Water, so I wanted to ask a question around, what are your thoughts on how the album is structured, right? Did you put the songs together in a way to kind of represent the flowing of a river?
Jonathan: Yeah, that was very intentional.
Tim: Yeah, tell me more about that.
Jonathan [15:18]: Yeah, so Time Flows Like Water, is a personal mantra, I suppose. It’s a personal thing I’ve taken into my life in the last two years of just “go with the flow.” You can’t let yourself be affected by everything that happens to you in life and then just react emotionally. You have to go with the flow, you have to be ready for things. You have to be ready for anything. So Time Flows Like Water is about… that’s what it means, is that: we’ve waited, we’ve stayed busy, we’ve stayed making music together, and now the flow is starting to give it back a little bit.
Tim [15:49]: And the album artwork is beautiful, can you tell me more about that?
Jonathan [15:53] Oh, the album artwork as well, so special. The artwork is a picture of a painting. So the painting was done by an amazing artist friend of mine from Kommetjie, her name is Sarah. She painted this and the song that she used as reference for the artwork was actually a very early version of Midnight Wasteland. It’s an outline of me, with space inside me. And the idea was to have the painting, scan it and be the artwork, but it just seemed a bit too centered in one aspect of the album.
So I spoke to another good friend of mine, Ian Miller, who’s a fantastic photographer from Kommetjie as well. He has worked Survivor for years. His photography in Kommetjie of all the wildlife and the ocean and stuff is just incredible. So I spoke to him about it and we chatted and, what can we do? What can we do? And eventually we came to the conclusion that the depth of field trick with the painting would be amazing because to someone – this is some feedback I got from the label as well – to someone who doesn’t know where that beach is, the rock behind the painting could be a mountain.
So the goal with the artwork was really just to paint an interesting picture, to catch your attention and to tie it into real life and the life we live inside our minds. So the painting represents the inside, and everything around the painting represents the outside. And it’s my personal belief that the best way to be a human being is to balance those two things perfectly.
Tim [17:23]: Wow. Well, it’s definitely a memorable album artwork. Do you think you will press up any vinyl copies of the record?
Jonathan [17:32]: Yes, the goal is to press vinyl. We were maybe gonna do it this year already, but it makes a lot more sense to do it a bit closer to our tour, because ideally, we would be selling most of the vinyls on our tour. Vinyls are an expensive investment, but they’re a good return as well, so we’ve just gotta build up some funds. We’ll probably do one or two shows in February/March to raise a bit of funds to help print them, and then we’ll ship some over to South Africa as well, for sure.
Tim [17:58]: Great. And as I mentioned earlier, you guys have put a lot of effort into your music videos. You’ve got at least four on your YouTube channel: Midnight Wasteland, Man Before, I’ll Wait For It and Wayward Water, which are all off the new record. Which is the new video coming out?
Jonathan [18:11]: Growing Pains. So there’s a Growing Pains music video coming out tomorrow. Well, tomorrow being the 21st of November, 2025. So the music video was supposed to serve a very specific purpose. It was another aspect of the self investment and serving the art. And if I’m gonna take myself seriously and put myself forward seriously in the space of creativity and art, I need to back it up, right? You can’t just give people 12 tracks and expect them to do all of the work on association. So we did these five music videos. Every music video fulfilled a specific purpose.
So Wayward Water, the first music video that came out, was this huge community effort from Kommetjie. No one charged anything, it was just everyone coming together for a day and making some amazing art. And that was supposed to serve as a showing for how cinematic our music can be when there’s a narrative going, when there’s visible emotion and beauty on the screen. Look, our music can cater it to this, you know what I mean? So that was Wayward Water.
I’ll Wait For It was supposed to be a bit more personal, ’cause it is a personal song. But that video was supposed to serve the purpose of, even something with a little bit less intensity and effort can still be represented beautifully by the art and the music. So we started with those two. Then we got to the second two singles. So the first two singles from the album were supposed to be a bit more contemporary, show people what’s coming in a bit more of an accessible sense. And then the second two singles, which were Man Before and Midnight Wasteland, were supposed to show off some of the more artsy and a bit more flowy aspects of the album that were coming out. ‘Cause I feel like the four singles that we released, are a good representation. If you heard them first and then heard the whole record, I think they’re a good representation of the whole thing.
So Man Before was again like, how beautiful can we make this really deep and personal song, and how can we tie it into all three of the guys going through a similar journey? ‘Cause the three of us are the same age, we’re all born in ’96. Ray is from Durban, Steve is from Joburg and I’m from Cape Town. So we formed a South African triangle and triangulated here in Cape Town. But we ended up putting some baby videos in that Man Before music video as well, all three of us. And that was just supposed to be a representation of what we’re singing about. It’s personal to us and it means something. And it’s not just Jonathan’s meaning, you know, it’s all three of ours.
Then one of the more rewarding music videos, Midnight Wasteland, was just… again, knowing people in Kommetjie and being confident enough to reach out and ask someone to see if they would feel comfortable expressing upon my expression. So there was no direction from us to Isabella. She teaches my fiance dancing, so it’s all very close and close connections. I just asked her to do it, she was keen instantly. I sent her the song and two weeks later she came back and she had this whole insane dance. So the purpose of that music video, in short, was to serve as a showing that someone else can express upon my expression as well. And look, it makes sense and we are connected and this is a collaboration now. So each of the four videos had a very specific purpose and Midnight Wasteland was especially special. I remember crying a little bit on the morning at the shoot just because I was so blown away by the meaning that someone could take out of the writing and the expression of dance that they could apply. It was incredible.
Tim [21:56]: It’s really beautiful work and I encourage the listeners to go and check out these music videos and of course, the new one dropping on November 21st. As someone that’s very interested in guitar specifically, I wanted to know what kinds of guitars you’re playing?
Jonathan [22:11]: Yeah, well, I haven’t got a crazy acoustic yet, you know, I don’t have a Martin or something amazing yet. But I got really lucky with a Tanglewood and an Ibanez, two beautiful acoustics. The Ibanez is maple, the Tanglewood is spruce top, but has such an insanely beautiful tone. But again, here I must shout out our mixing engineer. So we produced everything and recorded everything here. And when the songs were as good as I could make them, we decided they deserved another 10%. ‘Cause I still think to this day now, you can’t mix your own vocal because your decision making is too affected by how your voice sounds in your head.
So, André Hough, our incredible friend and incredible mixing engineer came in and really just made everything sound amazing. But this Tanglewood and this Ibanez, I only used two guitars on the whole album for all the layers. And the only interesting thing I do really is on my standard tuning guitar, ’cause I play in a standard tuning and an open tuning. So on my standard tuning, which is the Tanglewood, it’s tuned all the way down to D. So it’s not drop D, but the whole guitar is tuned a full step down. So it’s D, G, C, F, A and D again. Yeah, and then the other guitar is DADGAD, but also a full step down, so DADGAD in C. So I found that I really enjoy having my strings vibrate more, having deeper tones come outta the guitar. And that’s something that really filled me with confidence in terms of singing, because it helped me find a really sweet spot in my vocal.
Tim [23:49]: Incredible. Your friend André did a great job mixing parts of the record. Did he mix the whole record?
Jonathan [23:54]: Yeah. Yeah, he did final mixes on the whole thing.
Tim [23:57]: Wow. Well, yeah guys, you gotta pick up a copy of the new record, it’s called Time Flows Like Water from Jonathan Stephens Simons. You can visit bandcamp.com to buy a digital album there and take a look at the lyrics. And of course, Jonathan is on all the various socials, so you can check him out there too. And if you can catch a live show, you’re gonna be in for a treat. Any shows coming up anytime soon?
Jonathan [24:19]: No, I’m off to Europe again for Christmas and New Year’s, just doing some family stuff with my fiance’s family. So we were thinking of trying to do some shows before, but nothing really lined up. Look, it’s always difficult as well, with Steve and Ray because you can hear how phenomenal they are as musicians, they are phenomenal. I still am so grateful that they play with me and that we’ve formed this relationship and this musicianship together. But they’re busy guys, so there’s a lot that goes into consideration for these live shows. Do we have enough time to rehearse? Are we gonna do a good enough performance? Yada, yada. But we plan to come back hard in January, February, March next year with a lot of shows.
Tim [25:01]: Awesome. Yeah, so keep your ears to the ground if you wanna catch them live. And who knows, maybe if you’re wandering around the Imhoff Farm, you might catch them feeding some animals at the petting zoo there.
Jonathan [25:10]: Yeah, man. It’s just up the road, isn’t it?
Tim [25:13]: Absolutely. Well, Jonathan, thanks for joining me today, I really enjoyed the chat. Have a great New Year’s and we’ll catch you live next year and all the best for the release of the album.
Jonathan [25:23]: Hey, thank you so much, Tim. What a pleasure and what a blessing. Thank you for sharing interest in our art, we are eternally grateful. Thank you.