Johnny Blue Skies – Passage du Desir
“It Ain’t All Flowers,” the penultimate song on his sophomore album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, found Sturgill Simpson embarking one of the wildest rides that 21st century country could possibly provide. Opening with a sequence of backwards loops, the nearly seven-minute epic eases into a swamp rock groove, gradually escalating in intensity as Simpson lets out a series of fiery “woo-hoo!” whoops and promises that “When you play with the devil, you know you’re gonna get the horns.” Less than halfway through, “Flowers” achieves flight, soaring into a psychedelic rock bridge that seemed to cross dimensions and galaxies into a plane where country music had rarely ventured before.
In the decade since Simpson turned roots music upside-down and inside-out with his metaphysical explorations and experimental arrangements, the journey’s only gotten wilder. The soulful arrangements with Daptone’s horns on 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth felt like a natural extension of Metamodern Sounds‘ eclecticism, while the Eliminator-fueled fuzz rock of 2019’s anime soundtrack Sound & Fury seemed to take it to its most fiery extremes. And with the narrative songwriting of the more traditionalist The Ballad of Dood and Juanita, he channeled the concept-driven works of icons like Willie Nelson, all the while delivering bluegrass-style versions of some of his older material on two Cuttin’ Grass albums and trolling the CMAs with his busking act in 2017.
Simpson packed a career’s worth of achievements, experiments and pranks into a decade, and he suggested it might very well end there in a Rolling Stone interview in 2021, noting that Dood and Juanita would be the final Sturgill Simpson album. But he cleverly left out the loophole in that statement: What if he released music under a name other than his own? As such, his first album under the name Johnny Blue Skies acts as a kind of second debut, a reintroduction that invokes classic country kayfabe even as its title and artwork seem to evoke something more like ’60s-era French new wave cinema in its homage to his newly adopted home of Paris.
Despite what may or may not be simply surface level misdirection, Passage du Desir is unmistakably a Sturgill Simpson record, however more complicated a definition that might be six very different albums in—and with a pseudonym at that. Triangulating between Metamodern‘s heady country-psych and his later neo-traditionalism, Passage du Desir finds Simpson (or Johnny, if you prefer) arriving upon a gorgeously lush progressive country sound that echoes the innovators of the mid-1970s—Nelson, Prine, Clarks both Guy and Gene—while layering each of these eight songs with gorgeously maximalist arrangements. “If The Sun Never Rises Again” maintains a soulful simmer, gorgeous licks of guitar backed by the warm whir of organ, while the persistent pulse of “Right Kind of Dream” channels the kind of bright new wave proved to be part of Simpson’s musical language back when he covered When In Rome’s “A Promise” in 2014.
For all its stunning musical flourishes, Passage du Desir feels a little less like a thematic reinvention than a return to the more earnest and introspective songwriting that comprised 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. No moment carries as much emotional anguish as the gorgeous country-rock centerpiece “Jupiter’s Faerie,” a meditation on the death of an estranged friend that looks at grief from a distance but finds it still cuts as deep. “In my heart, I guess I always knew/Somehow one of us would end this way,” he sings, against a rich yet understated backing of piano, organ and guitar. “What’s done is done, now there’s nothing left to say.” Yet Simpson leans on playful humor in the more lighthearted “Scooter Blues,” name-checking sites in Thailand on a Jimmy Buffett-style escape fantasy into permanent separation from the grid: “Think I’ll move to an island and turn into vapor.”
Closing track “One for the Road” is likewise a view through an open door, a breakup song from the perspective of someone offering one last olive branch before moving on for good. At nearly nine minutes long, however, it suggests no particular hurry in closing that door, and as such gives Simpson the opportunity to stretch out in one of his most stunning compositions to date, an expansive psychedelic desert-folk odyssey that’s cut from the same cloth as “It Ain’t All Flowers” but moves at a more languid pace. The potential paths that unfold from here are seemingly limitless—the ride is far from over.
Label: High Top Mountain
Year: 2024
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Johnny Blue Skies : Passage du Desir
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