Simon Safran releases ‘Shake that Sight’ — and it’s effortlessly incredible

It’s hard to spill your guts to your best friends, let alone a cutthroat industry, but Simon Safran fights the discomfort and lays it out on the table in their debut album Shake That Sight, a project saturated in emotional anecdotes, harrowing technicalities and all the complexities that come with the faults and triumphs of human nature. Safran is a writer that leans into the extraordinary nature of the mundane, bringing importance to even something as normal as hair in a shower drain.

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Shake That Sight, a nine-song album that features a slew of complex storylines, is a project that Safran started recording in November of last year. A few of the songs were written in college, such as “Before the Road” and “Inhumane,” but once the recording process started, the songsmith began to feel the momentum of what could be an album. Each song on the album feels like its own little world, and Safran tells stories wrapped up in personal experiences that feel unique yet relatable all at the same time. 

“Most of these songs are about situations or people that, at this point, feel like I’ve thought too much about. I felt like I needed to move on,” Safran told Pleaser sitting inside of Ugly Mugs, a coffee shop on the East side of Nashville. “Some of them are about feeling kind of lost after graduating and moving. Most of them just tend to be like feelings that I have reflected on enough. Like it’s time to put it on paper and like, step away from it.” 

For Safran, songwriting is a very significant release. They’re like markers in time, a record of every important emotional experience they’ve lived through in their life. From songs about the heartache that comes with letting someone go to the guttural discomfort that stirs in the bellies of anyone who’s having a difficult time with our current political climate, Safran writes for those seeking to listen, ponder and feel.

The very first song on the album, “Cha Ching,” is a phenomenal example of lyrical genius, as nothing said in the track is spoken in a casual fashion. It’s a hit to those in political power, written from the standpoint of someone experiencing the consistent blows that our current administration is sending towards those making less than 400,000 dollars a year. 

“When we sat down, we were both actively upset about Elon Musk, honestly,” Safran said. “We were like ‘let’s write a song about wealth and equality.’ And initially, I think we were going for like, an intense scathing review. And I had a hard time taking stuff like that seriously, because I feel like once you hit a certain level of ‘I hate this, I hate this, I hate this,’ you kind of come off a little bit childish. Like the messages are not nearly as effective. So I suggested we did it in more of this, like, tongue-and-cheek kind of satirical way, like we’re writing from the perspective of the person where nothing is going right in their life and they think that, oh, if I was a CEO, or if I was a billionaire, my life would be so much better.”

There’s a lot of unrealistic perspective in the song, as the narrator jumps from their shower not working and not doing laundry for months (a reality I’m sure a lot of us know all too well), to wishing they were sitting on an ivory coast with a pina colada. 

“I felt like putting it in that perspective, to make it all the more like ‘isn’t this ridiculous?’” Safran continued.

As the album continues from song to song, there are just incredible moments of imagery that truly stick out to listeners. In the song “Inhumane,” Safran writes about sickeningly sorrowful things, like feeling so defeated you’d drink perfume as a way to feel something. It’s really a difficult thing to go through, feeling so threatened by your own thoughts and actions that you would do anything to make the feelings go away. We hear it time and time again that it’s important to talk about mental health, but when we actually do, there’s always some sort of stigma wrapped around the thought of being anything less than okay. Safran writes in a way that’s destructively heavy, yet filled with this digestible identity that feels significant to anyone who’s ever felt like a self-destructive time bomb. 

“The whole song’s about suicide. And looking around at your world and being like, ‘I have nothing and everything I’m doing is destructive.’ I struggled a lot with that in high school,” They said. “So these are emotions that I’ve had processing for a really long time. But the drinking perfume lines specifically.”

Safran compares the line in the song to a John Mulaney comedy skit, where he talks about how he was at a party drinking and someone says, “is this alcohol or perfume,” downs the whole bottle and then goes “It’s perfume?” Before smashing the bottle. 

“For me, that was really funny, but also very telling,” Safran continued. “No one drinks an entire bottle of perfume without being in a really terrible state of mind, and so when I was writing the song, I was like, ‘what’s a really self-destructive thing I can think of that rhymes with afternoon?’”

It’s remarkable how much emotion Safran has been able to fit inside this 9-track record. One of my favorite songs on the album, “TV on the Floor,” holds some of the greatest examples of writing in this album. It’s full of truth, and you can absolutely tell by the way Safran recalls their anecdotes. 

“We did eat Thai food. I used to leave $20 bills in the top drawer of my dresser. Like, all of it feels real and impactful because that really is what happened. There’s no fluff in that one,” the songsmith recalled. “That’s just sort of me dipping into the memory of sitting in her house and doing those mundane things, and just remembering how easy it was. I remember doing dishes for her one time while she was sick and being like, ‘I could do this forever.’”

The details in Shake That Sight are what make Safran’s project, produced by Vance Spina and Grace Quackenboss, so special, and dare I say one of my favorite records to come out of 2025. From lines about leaving 20s in the drawer for a significant other to buy takeout, to watching TV on the floor to the line “I can’t comply freely with faith and good luck / You don’t love me enough,” in the second to last song “Next Year Tonight.” There are so many beautiful moments in this album that convey the simplicity of caring for someone you love, the fear of being left alone, the curiosity of a life where equality isn’t a fairytale– it’s all so intricately written. Safran grasps the concept of a well-written song, and that is abundantly present in each track of their debut record. Pleaser cannot wait to see where Safran will go next as an up-and-coming artist.