Sturgill Simpson’s new album is Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.
By Jim Morrison
Thanks to his critically-acclaimed “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music,” Sturgill Simpson became the first artist to win the Nashville Scene’s Country Music Poll without having a Top 40 country song. He topped the No Depression readers’ poll and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Americana album.
He also topped the latest list of acts named the saviors of a brain-dead genre – popular country music.
Simpson, who comes to The NorVa on Sept. 15, has been joined at the guitar strap with artists like Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, and Kacey Musgraves who are loved by critics and fans, but can’t get on the airwaves.
When Jason Isbell’s superb “Something More than Free” topped Billboard’s Country chart earlier this month without radio airplay, it led thumb-suckers in as diverse places as Nashville and London (The Guardian newspaper) to declare a stunning divide in country music. Gasp.
“These acts succeeding without the support of country radio seem like obvious evidence about where country music should be headed. Country fans are finding their music on their own already,” The Guardian claimed.
Surprise. What’s new is new again. Just ask Steve Earle or Nanci Griffith, Kris Kristofferson or Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett or k.d. lang in decades past. While Waylon and Willie and Johnny, as well as Jamey Johnson and others managed to be both critical darlings, outlaws, and get airplay, that’s often not the case.
Simpson, for his part, seems to understand. In a story headlined “Is Sturgill Simpson Country Music’s Savior,” he told Rolling Stone magazine that he doesn’t concern himself with labels or airplay. He’s not a country star, never has wanted to be one. He just plays music he likes. Some of it just happens to sound a lot like vintage 1970s Waylon Jennings.
“A lot of journalists, it feels like they want to lure me into being the poster boy, and talk shit about modern country, and I just don’t have anything to really offer there,” he told Rolling Stone. “Because, fortunately, I’ve never pursued that side of the industry, which means I never had the opportunity to be screwed over or have any of these horror stories that you hear about. So for me to sit and talk about that stuff would be insulting to people who have, and extremely naïve.”
“Nothing is really different than it was. It’s always been like this,” continues Simpson on the cycles of country music. “I think Tompall Glaser said it best in the Seventies: ‘Unless you have a solution or an alternative, shut the fuck up. Because you’re just part of the problem.’ I just want to write music that pertains to my life as honestly as I can.”
What pertains to his life is life, real life. Lee Ann Womack, in an interview last year, said the dividing line in country music was not drum loops and ’80s rock sound vs. pedal steel and close harmonies. After all, Simpson’s sound draws on Radiohead, Beck, and the existentialism of Kris Kristofferson (Simpson says he hasn’t had time for reading lately, but his list of favorites includes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Nature,” and “The Phenomenon of Man” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He’s been listening to Run the Jewels and Marvin Gaye).
Simpson sings about real problems and big questions and that, Womack says, is the dividing line between the country you hear on the radio and the indie country that charts so well on Americana radio — the country of Brandy Clark, Kacey Musgraves, Rodney Crowell, .Chris Stapleton, Dwight Yoakam, and Jim Lauderdale.
“I wanted to make a social consciousness album about love,” he told NPR.
In other interviews he has called “Metamodern Sounds,” named after Ray Charles’s “Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music,” “a hippie love record.” Shades of Kristofferson and Cash in the Sixties and Waylon and Willie in the Seventies. But then on “Metamodern Sounds” there’s that backwards loop that sounds like something out of Pink Floyd, those mentions of mushrooms and marijuana, and that much-discussed reference to “turtles all the way down” in the superb opening cut. The phrase is a reference to any number of cosmic theories (Stephen Hawking in a book dates the story to Bertrand Russell, who said an old lady at the end of one of his lectures told him theories of a orbiting Earth were rubbish and the world was a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise with “turtles all the way down.”
Simpson, for his part, goes all hippie metaphysical.
“The turtle myth is kind of a comedic expression in metaphysics now. It represents a much grander idea of what is known as the Unmoved Mover, or this one central divine source of all complex consciousness in the universe. And according to the theory — and I say theory because I don’t ever want to say I agree with it — but it is still a beautiful idea that everything is being emitted from one point and that we’re all this universal shared consciousness,” he told NPR.
Every time I take a look inside, inside that old and fabled book
I’m blinded and reminded of the pain caused by some old man in the sky
Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, and DMT they all changed the way I see
But love’s the only thing that ever saved my life
So don’t waste your mind on nursery rhymes
Or fairy tales of blood and wine
It’s turtles all the way down the line
So to each their own til’ we go home
To other realms our souls must roam
To and through the myth that we all call space and time
Maybe there’s another divide in country music. Florida Georgia Line won’t ever reference the Unmoved Mover or cosmic space and time (except when it comes to pickups and Solo cups) while Simpson is unlikely to sing about Victoria’s Secret or a brand new Chevy with a lift kit. Simpson is never going to get to mumble through a short set of rock songs labeled as country on the Today show, as Jason Aldean did this summer. But then Aldean is unlikely to appear featured with a long interview discussing Emerson on NPR, as Simpson was last year.
“Metamodern Sounds” is Simpson’s second shot. His first, “High Top Mountain” came out in 2013. He put up $25,000 to record the album, which largely flopped. He spent $4,000 and four days recording “Metamodern Sounds.”
He moved to Nashville for the first time in 2005 and says he spent about nine months living in an East Nashville apartment, holed up in the bottom of a barrel. Then he hit the road, working on the railroad in Salt Lake before operating a locomotive. He returned to Kentucky when his grandfather got ill and met his wife. He returned for a brief stint in a railroad office job back in Utah that pushed him to pull the guitar out of the closet. He moved with his wife about. He got into reading about science and religion and cosmology and physics. His wife told him to “get it out of your system” and write songs about it.
The disc also delves into some of his dark days, days when he crawled into a bottle and other hallucinogens in his East Nashville apartment chronicled in “It Ain’t All Flowers:”
Cleaning out the darkest corners of my mind
Taking all my full circles and making them straight lines
Been getting to the bottom of the bottom getting to me
Holding up the mirror to everything I don’t want to see.
But it ain’t all flowers.
Sometimes you gotta feel the thorns
And when you play with the Deveil you know you gonna get the horns.
Sales have exceeded 100,000 and he’s playing venues with capacities of thousands, not hundreds. The disc landed the Kentucky native a major label deal with Atlantic, albeit with the Los Angeles office, not Nashville.
Still, he knows the score. Country radio isn’t going to change. Simpson, Isbell, and Musgraves are not suddenly going to be in heavy rotation on Eagle 97.3 or elsewhere. “It’s not like Clear Channel is going to wake up tomorrow and be like, ‘Oh, let’s play this guy for a while and see what happens.’ No. There are no delusions of the tide shifting. I just try to do what I believe in and, more importantly, wake up in 20 or 30 years and still feel proud,” he told The Washington Post. “These records may be the only semblance of who I actually was someday. To anybody that gives a shit.”
WANT TO GO?
Sturgill Simpson
Tuesday, September 15
The NorVa
(Jim Morrison is a voter in the Nashville Scene Poll. Simpson’s “Metamodern Sounds” topped his 2014 list followed by Mary Gauthier’s “Trouble and Love.”)
