Find everything you save in your account
Find everything you log into your account
“First of all, let’s take a moment. Do you see those pustule marks?Do you know what that is?”” Bullet holes. From World War II, when they ran through the streets to fight with firearms. They just abandoned him. I think it’s so amazing. I mean, come on, man, how are you going to be in a bad mood?We’re not in the middle of gun combat right now in a metropolis, so we’re probably going to be fine. Fascism has its moments, but it never lasts. “
Simpson may seem like an unlikely travel advisor in Paris, but he’s smart. The Kentucky-born composer speaks a forged French and moves deftly through the streets of Marais. After intentionally staying off the music industry radar and traveling (some would say compulsively) for two years, he made the city his base and launching pad for a new bust in his life.
This week he releases his first new album in three years, Passage du Désir, under the name Johnny Blue Skies. Written in Paris and recorded at Clement House Recording Studio in Nashville and London’s Abbey Road, it’s another departure from a serial departure. . Simpson is classified as a country artist in the outlaw tradition, known for his groundbreaking 2014 Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (reissued for its 10th anniversary this year with a skull replacing Sturill’s face on the cover) and the following Grammy-winning album: top A Sailor’s Guide to Landing. But he’s equally famous for bucking national conventions, whether traveling outside the CMAs to secure donations from the ACLU, releasing the Southern rock album Sound.
“Sturgill doesn’t stick to trends, he creates them,” says Margo Price, a lifelong musical compatriot whose third album Simpson co-produced. “He’s a little daring and doesn’t bow down to the press or his audience. It reminds me of Neil Young in the sense that he writes from his center and likes to experiment. Sturgill is an island: it burns bridges to stand firm in its center, and it will have to have a reputation for following its muse no matter which path it takes. “
“There’s a maverick in me that needs to go against any kind of expectation,” Simpson said. “If something works, there’s an idea in my brain like, ‘No, they tell me to do that again. ‘ »
No one told him to move to Paris, leave his name behind, and record a collection of genre-spanning love songs, but that’s what makes Passage du Désir an instant vintage in his catalog. This reflects a long era of wandering, introspection and “I’m suffering. I’m pushing away the global,” Simpson said. The pain hasn’t gone away, but Simpson has learned to notice it and take advantage of it. Today, despite his new name, he is more himself than ever. and he creates some of the most productive music of his career.
Simpson’s journey to Paris began when the world was emerging from COVID. “I was out of contract with the label and I was in an incredibly positive space. I was betting and recording all this bluegrass music with arguably one of the most productive bluegrass bands ever assembled,” he says, referring to three albums, Cuttin’ Grass: Vol 1
But he took the road too hard. In 2021, halfway through Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Tour, he broke his vocal cords and had to cancel the rest of his tour appearances, as well as scheduled dates at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and New York’s Webster Hall. “So now I’m sitting at home, and after going through a pretty dark couple of years, thinking about the music industry and what it means to me, and I suddenly found myself in a positive attitude, just excited about music. . . And I literally can’t sing. I couldn’t even communicate. He was like Anthony Hopkins with the portrait of Legends of the Fall.
The whiplash – the relief of being able to play despite everything, only to find himself at home – sent him to a dark place. “I’ve struggled with what I’m now told is dysthymia: recurrent, long-term, treatment-resistant. “This just threw my dick on the floor,” he said. “The man’s efforts simply seemed futile, to put it lightly. Stuck at home and unable to speak, let alone sing, I knew I wasn’t in the way. “”So I told my spouse, ‘I have to go, because my mind is dark here. ‘”
He went unnoticed, remained in close contact with his circle of family but almost completely disconnected from the music industry. “We didn’t communicate much,” said David Ferguson, who co-produced Passage of Desire with Simpson, “but I knew he would. “”Ferguson, a famous maker and sound engineer who has worked with Johnny Cash and John Prine, has been a close friend and collaborator of Simpson since they met at a card game in Dan Auerbach’s space in 2015. “He often disconnected and his phone didn’t work. He would text her: “How are you?”and the reaction was just a photo of a beautiful lagoon.
Simpson has been an avid traveler since his days in the Navy, when he decided to be stationed in Japan after graduating at the top of his class from Virginia Beach. This time, his travels took him through Europe and Asia. “He just wanted to move to old places with a lot of history,” he said, “to get away from the new, from the existing and from everything. “
Before France, he was in Thailand. He had originally come there to film his scenes for The Creator alongside John David Washington, but ended up exploring the country on a moped (“If you ever need to fully revel in your human potential, ride a scooter in Bangkok,” he said. All the engines of situational awareness are working”), forming an organization of local friends and helping them build a bar on a secluded beach. One of them, a former monk who told Simpson that he “needed protection. “” and encouraged him to get a Buddhist prayer tattoo on his back.
Between this first layover in and the next in, he spent approximately six months in Thailand. It is a restorative experience. The collective business of opening the bar, the relaxed atmosphere where his biggest resolution on any given day was whether or not to wear a shirt, the Sanskrit tattoo on his back, all of that provided a much-needed opportunity for reflected imagery and spiritual rejuvenation. “I found myself not only with a completely new vision,” he says, “but also with a new energy with which I try to approach life. “
He is reluctant to describe this perspective/energy to strangers: it is only for him. “People locate what they want and what they are supposed to locate. I don’t want to take them there. I’m riding another wave,” he said. But when asked for more details, he alludes to something halfway between mysticism and the racing method. “Let’s put it this way. Everywhere you go, especially in ancient places, what you do is believe, but there are also, let’s say, belief portals. I’m not talking about drugs or intrinsic entheogenic nonsense. That was 10 years ago, we all listened to that record,” he says, referring to the psychedelic philosophy of Metamodern, which invoked the revelatory homes of cannabis, LSD, DMT and psilocybin in its first track. “I’m far from what they call enlightenment or reaching the limits. , so we are stuck here for a time in the physical realm, and we are here to feel. Whether it is pleasure, pain, suffering, whatever, we are still here No. Pain is a tool. And I learned to look at those things as an artistic team and not feel bad about them. I just pray to Marvin Gaye, so let’s go.
Whatever call you need to give to everything, he brought it with him to Paris. She arrived by chance, left London exercising to escape the crowds around the Queen’s Jubilee in 2022, and discovered other people dancing in the streets of Beaumarchais during the Fête de los angeles Musique. The connection was instantaneous. ” For some reason, that week was like seeing life in color again for the first time in a long time,” Simpson said. “The city, the sunlight. . . If you’re in a bad mood, just go for a walk and immerse yourself in this breathing masterpiece. I even think the French take this for granted. “
He continued to travel, but returned to Paris for longer and longer stays, first for weeks, then months, and found the city during long evening walks. “This place is kind of haunted,” he says. I walk through this town at 3 or 4 in the morning and there is no doubt that they touch you on the shoulder. That’s crazy. I have felt hypersensitive to this energy. This town vibrates.
It turns out that Simpson makes good friends all over the world, and Paris is no different. During the time I spent with Simpson, he dressed the owners of his favorite cafe and greeted a woman on the street with a hug and a “Sadee ka! His French friends affectionately call him the cowboy. One of them identified the Simpson Parisian intern waiting to flourish and become the Virgil of his Dante. “He showed me the genuine abdomen of all the neighborhoods: when to go, when not to go, how not to look, act, communicate and not look like a tourist. ” The most recommendation number one: don’t be loud. Be rude: if you’re nice, then they’ll know. And you don’t wear white socks.
After five or six months, he felt comfortable enough to get creative again. “I was writing all the time,” he recalls, calling the record “a cathartic diarrhea of feelings that I needed to get out of and deal with. “He wrote 3 or 4 albums of upbeat songs during his two years on tour. Simpson has a tendency to write piecemeal, stitching bits and concepts together into songs over time, and then temporarily recording two or 3 takes consistent with the song. Ferguson, who has worked with Simpson since Sailor’s Guide, said he “knew what I wanted” for Passage of Desire. He arrived in the studio with his elaborate guitar parts and a clear vision of what the record would sound like, so much so that he sang almost all of the harmonies himself.
Ferguson said few singers can pull this off as well as Simpson. “Sturgill has so many voices,” Ferguson said. He has a very intelligent range. Some of it comes from his chest, some comes from his throat, some comes from his head and it can move his tone through those 3 areas. He has several tones for each vowel. . This makes his voice interesting, recognizable. He has character, something that is missing in a lot of music these days. »
“I just wanted to make love songs,” Simpson said, citing the Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac, Procol Harum and Van Morrison’s and JJ Cale’s “grown-up records” as influences (“This guy is a prolific listener,” Ferguson noted).
The resulting album is perhaps the most available paintings Simpson has ever recorded, a vast musical collection of songs about love and loss spanning country, pop and rock. “If you ask me what I just did, it sounds like I just made a rock and roll record,” Simpson said. “Honestly, I feel like it’s the most personal album I’ve ever made, because it’s a little bit of everything else, after all done together. ”
So it’s ironic that such a typical Sturgill Simpson album is rarely technically a Sturgill Simpson album. Enter Johnny Blue Skies, the artist credited at Passage du Désir. More than anything, Johnny Blue Skies is a feature, a way to distance Sturgill. the individual, from the music he transmits to the world. Ferguson noted that Simpson is “remarkably shy, you know?It’s surprising how shy big stars are. Johnny Cash is shy. Nobody knew, but I was scared to death. “
During his travels around the world, Simpson discovered that fame was too close for his comfort. “I was in an airport or a restaurant and I heard someone say my call and I turned around and realized I had no idea who that userArray was,” Simpson said. “Suddenly I heard that call and it was like it didn’t belong to me. It’s just a product or a brand.
“Sturgill served his purpose but he died, he’s gone and I’m not that guy anymore,” he explained. “That’s why I put this skeleton face on this [reissue] Metamodern cover. I can’t even understand it.
Passage of Desire may be the first album recorded under the Johnny Blue Skies name, but the call has been floating around in the sprawling Sturgill Simpson universe for years. The warning “Watch out for the fearsome pirate Johnny Blue Skies” appears on the cover of Sailor’s Guide to Earth, and the call is credited in Sound’s animated accompaniment
“When I was 21, there was a bar in Lexington, Kentucky, with a bartender named Dave who was like Silent Bob and Charles Bukowski, literally in a long trench coat, and he might do a lot more Zippo tricks than anyone else. we deserve to know,” Simpson said. When I started betting and gaining confidence in open mics and stuff, he would come to this other bar and see me because it was his night off. And it started every time I walked into his bar, it said, “Johnny Blue Skies. “So I just got started.
Name aside, Sturgill Simpson enthusiasts will get to know familiar territories in the early days of Johnny Blue Skies: mermaids and nautical imagery, cosmic fantasy, literary sensibility. “Jupiter’s Faerie,” a poignant tribute to a friend who committed suicide, is a wonderful surreal ballad. But Passage du Désir also has an undeniably foreign quality that reflects the reports that shaped it, with lyrics about wine-soaked Parisian nights in “Swamp of Sadness” and the flight of fame to Thailand in “Scooter Blues. “
But the genuine core of the book is “Who I Am,” the closest Passage du Désir comes to a thesis statement. There he sings,
I have everything, I am even my name
I’ve made adjustments and discovered clarity.
And the convenience of nothing being the same again.
Simpson, the album’s most classic country song, candidly addresses the emotions that led him to flee to Paris in the first place: sadness and self-loss. Tellingly, Simpson doesn’t claim to have discovered any answers. Instead, he accepts that he doesn’t have one. It’s a kind of enlightenment.
“What I learned at forty-five is that I don’t know anything,” said Simpson, now 46. “When you’re forty-five, you’re going to lose your mind. As a lawyer, I advise you to be prepared, because chickens come home to sleep.
For now, it turns out he’s back in the same position as before the globetrotter and Passage of Desire: excited to play. Headline Outside Lands in August. ” This will be the first time I’ve been at the same level in years and I’ll headline the last night. It’s perfect. I’m Tyson with the towel, man, I like pressure, I’m like the underdog. I’m going to punch everyone in the teeth. I’m excited, brother. I’m screwed.
Who will take the stage, Sturgill Simpson or Johnny Blue Skies? This is such a big question that Simpson added an FAQ section to his online page to answer it (“Q: Is Johnny Blue Skies Sturgill Simpson? A: Yes”). The fact is a little more complicated, because Johnny Blue Skies is many things. A pirate, a bum with the face of Sean Penn, the guy at the open mic at your nearest dive bar. “He’s someone you need him to be, man. ” Simpson said: “He is a mythological hero who has come to introduce us to this new era of love and light. ” Above all, he is too much of an artist to get stuck before heading to the next city.
Photography via Nicky ZengGrooming via Karla GarzaSpecial thanks to the Museum of Hunting and Nature
More from GQ
Connect