The Brooklyn-based musician has learned to move through restlessness by moving toward something else: a song, a film, a museum, a play, a new city, a room full of people. “It’s always a feeling of excitement,” Simons says of the period before a creative burst. “You feel the earth bubbling a bit.” When one medium begins to stall, he shifts his attention. “If I’m working on a song and it’s just not flowing and I’m overthinking it, then I’ll put the guitar down and go see a film or go to a museum or go to a play.”

That sense of movement carried through BREDA’s recent evening at &Son in New York, an intimate gathering celebrating time, style, and the objects that move with us. The event brought together friends, artists, and collaborators in a setting that felt less like a formal presentation and more like a shared pause. The night reflected the same kind of easy collision that defines Simons’ world: music, clothing, conversation, and the charge of being in the right room at the right time.

Simons’ music has often been described through its brightness: the hooks, the energy, an invitation to let loose. But beneath that forward motion is a more complicated relationship to time. “I think both in a way,” he says when asked whether he moves through life quickly or slowly. “I’m always thinking nothing is happening fast enough, but then I look back on the past year and I’ve done so much and so much has changed.”

It is a familiar tension: the impatience of the present against the clearness of hindsight. For Simons, performance seems to sit somewhere between the two. On stage, time tightens. The room sharpens. A song that may have begun as instinct becomes something newly revealing. “…when I’m completely immersed in a song, thinking about every line I’m singing, new emotions begin to surface that I hadn’t felt before. That’s why music is so powerful. It can unlock feelings and parts of yourself you never even knew were there.”

In the audience, he notices something else: release. Lake Hour and Steven Graff Wines may have helped, but Simons sees live music as the real catalyst. “People being able to let loose,” he says. “I think live music is more important now than it ever has been for that sole reason. People feel cramped in their everyday life. Live music relieves all of that.” That attention to atmosphere extends beyond music. Simons’ sense of personal style, like his sound, is constantly shifting with whatever has captured his imagination. “I think it’s always ever changing, depending on what I’m into at the time,” he says. “I used to strictly only wear bell-bottoms and crop tops, so I think I’ve come a long way.”

Still, change for Simons does not mean looking backward. Though his music draws from earlier forms and familiar textures, nostalgia itself holds little appeal. “I really think I’m the least nostalgic person,” he says. “I like to move forward. I don’t know if it’s dangerous, but it’s not conducive to creativity.”

That refusal of nostalgia is what makes his relationship to objects more interesting. He is not sentimental in the obvious sense. He is not trying to preserve every version of the past. But he understands the way a single object can mark a life before and after.

When Simons was 16, his family moved to Shanghai after his father took a job there. He arrived in a new country without knowing anyone, surrounded by the strange intimacy of unpacked boxes, furniture, and clothes in an unfamiliar home. “I remember us unpacking furniture and clothes trying to make this new place feel like home,” he says. “Then this old guitar showed up, one a relative had given my family years before.”

The moment stayed with him. “I took the guitar into my room and strummed one chord, and something just clicked,” he says. “It wasn’t dramatic or anything, I just knew. From that moment on, this was all I wanted to do with my life.”

Objects have a way of doing that. In a way, every time Simons picks up a guitar, that Shanghai room is somewhere in it. 

With BREDA, time is often understood through the objects we carry with us. A timepiece can be practical, personal, ornamental, or inherited. It can become part of a uniform, a ritual, a photograph, a night out, a version of yourself you did not yet know you were becoming. For Simons, the guitar in Shanghai became that kind of object, a beginning. And perhaps that is the clearest way to understand his momentum. He is not looking back to stay there. He is gathering what matters and carrying it forward, one chord at a time.