I have so many things to concentrate my energy on. So it’s not a case of what’s next, but which next. “The problem with starting so late in life is that I have so many clear-cut ideas of the kind of albums I want to make, but the mechanics of the music industry work so slowly. You have to live for right now.”įor Simpson, that means making up for what he sees as lost time. I’ve learned to stop trying to control things you can never control, just give yourself to the moment. Until my wife taught me how to believe in myself. “I was disenchanted and maybe a bit nihilistic for a while. Gradually he quit drinking, picked up the guitar again and started writing. Instead he put music on the back burner and made his way to Salt Lake City and worked on the Union Pacific Railroad. He first tried his hand in Nashville in 2005, but “spent the year looking through the bottom of a bottle, pretty depressed because pop country was at its peak”. I went in about a week after leaving high school.”Īt 19 years old Simpson was stationed in Japan, after which he returned home to Lexington, Kentucky and formed a bluegrass combo, Sunday Valley. Joining the navy was an impulsive decision. I got in trouble selling drugs and other things like that. It was kind of tumultuous growing up, so after my parents split up I went wild. “My father was a narcotics officer and did a lot of work undercover for the state police. It’s a piece of wisdom Simpson gleaned from his past. One of the album’s most pressing directives, as expressed in Keep It Between The Lines, is to stay off the hard stuff and keep your eyes on the prize. So I thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s go for it.’” Jones produced Stardust, so it’s not a new concept for a country singer to bring in soul elements. A lot of Willie’s earlier records were cut with the Muscle Shoals guys, and Booker T. Marvin Gaye, Van Morrison and Willie Nelson are huge influences. The nautical allusions to breakers, gales and foghorns find their musical equivalent in brassy R&B and saturated waves of strings and pedal steel: “It was about capturing the types of music I wanted to share with my son. The theme this time is family and fatherhood, with Simpson using the album as an extended communiqué to his two-year-old son and offering advice on how best to navigate a passage through life. His latest album, A Sailor’s Guide To Earth, is another conceptual piece. “I guess my music is a little weird and dark for the good-time crowd.”Ģ014’s blindingly good Metamodern Sounds In Country Music was a psychedelic foray into cosmology and metaphysics a deep spiritual quest that included songs about alien life and hallucinogens. “I couldn’t feel more outside of that world people associate with modern country music,” he says. He also appeals to the alternative set a progressive outlaw who cites Radiohead, Tool and Nirvana for being as influential as the Stanley Brothers and the old-time bluegrass of his Kentucky roots. Blessed with a majestic voice that places him in the great lineage of Haggard and George Jones, his countrypolitan purity makes him a banker with the traditionalists. It’s not difficult to understand his popularity. The last three years have felt like ten, because so much has happened.” “When you’re on the train it’s hard to tell how fast it’s going. “It all feels a bit foggy,” he admits, prior to going on stage at a sold-out gig in Oslo. Last September he was voted Artist Of The Year at the Americana Awards and, more recently, scored a No.3 album on the Billboard chart. He’s shared stages with John Prine, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, appeared on US TV shows including Letterman and Conan, and packed in audiences across the States and Europe. Now he’s being fêted as country’s big-shot saviour. Three years ago he was just another aspiring singer-songwriter in Nashville, stumping up his own money to record an album, only for his voice to be drowned out amid a sea of slick bro-country and Music Row pop. Sturgill Simpson’s rise to stardom has been little short of meteoric. The Kentucky sailor-turned-songwriter was all adrift until he started making cosmic country albums about extra-terrestrials and the sea.
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