Sturgill Simpson

However, you won’t find any traces of Nashville tropes tucked away in his songwriting. Exemplified in his latest effort Metamodern Sounds In Country Music, Simpson is more concerned with existentialist ideas than sinking beers in the back of a pickup truck. He’s got one foot rooted in tradition and another far out into the cosmos.

Simpson’s music sees traditional bluegrass and country sounds collide head first with a psychedelic palette of warbled tape echoes and dizzying ambience. In a genre often accused of rehashing itself, Simpson continues to defy both expectation and convention. “I think the most meaningful art is trying to show people something they have never seen or heard before,” Simpson says in his lethargic Southern drawl. “I think that’s what any real artist is chasing. Whether you get there or not, [it] is the ultimate goal.”

Metamodern Sounds In Country Music was pitched as a relatively low-key follow-up to Simpson’s debut, High Top Mountain. Recorded over a whirlwind five-day session with kingpin producer Dave Cobb, its release garnered huge acclaim, with critics and fans alike crowning Simpson the modern-day saviour of country music who had come to liberate it from the shackles of overproduced and commercialised songwriting.

“Country – more than any other music style in America – just stagnated at a certain point,” Simpson says. “Sonically speaking, I love country music but I love all kinds of music. I’ve listened to everything you can possibly imagine throughout my life at various stages. Aside from a writing perspective, I’m equally as interested in exploring sonic possibilities as much as anything else. I think it’s sort of necessary. I’m not chasing a commercial career, so there’s really no reason not to pursue new sounds.”

Simpson is the first to admit he is not a laborious songwriter. He doesn’t lock himself away for hours on end, polishing and refining arrangements until all the ragged edges are smoothed over. Nor does he feel the need to. There is something profoundly human in the beauty of imperfection, and Simpson writes music in the same way he tries to live his life – in the moment and to the point.

“If I have an idea for a song, it tends to come very quickly, in 20 or 30 minutes,” he says. “I find if I end up working any longer, I’m just overthinking it until it’s less than what I’d hoped. Once I get started on a song, I hear how I want it to sound in my head because I know what I’d be trying to say musically to emphasise the lyrics. I’m always writing, whether I want to or not. When it happens, it kind of has to happen. I wish I could be lazier,” he says, completely deadpan.

Indeed, when Simpson talks about music, it is with a sense of gravitas that indicates how seriously he takes his craft. “I’m very introverted and I don’t go out a lot, so when I’m home, off the road, I tend to live in the studio to get rid of nervous energy. I could probably put out two records right now if I wanted to.”

The buzz that has surrounded Simpson since Metamodern Sounds has catapulted the once-unknown artist onto the world stage, complete with a Grammy nomination and a freshly inked major label deal through Atlantic. It has proved a blessing and a curse for Simpson, however, as he has never personally connected with the iconoclastic title imposed on him. “I was just trying to push the envelope in terms of my own expectations,” he says. “It was all about personal growth and personal challenge – trying to express other influences or experiences from my life that I’d yet to capture or touch on.”

It is baffling to look back now and think that Simpson entered the studio ahead of Metamodern Sounds without even a concrete intention to make an album. “Really, I think that record got made because there was nobody in the room telling us that we probably shouldn’t,” he says. “It’s true. I honestly didn’t think much would come out of it. We weren’t really trying to make a record, we just had the week off and I had some songs. I released it myself again on my little label thinking, ‘This is it – this is probably the last record I’ll make.’ Then it sort of snowballed.” And snowball it did, selling over 150,000 copies in the US alone. Not a bad effort for an album made on a US$4,000 budget.

Aside from its acid-laced production values, one of the most groundbreaking things about Metamodern Sounds is the lyrical content. Like all great country songwriters, Simpson is a natural-born storyteller. However, in place of the usual reflections on small-town life and whisky-fuelled nights come tightly woven narratives of space and time, hallucinogenic drugs and the writing of Stephen Hawking. It’s not the traditional fodder for a country music song – but that’s entirely the point.

“I wanted to challenge myself to write country songs about things other than heartache and drinking. A lot of people get hung up on all the drugs, or the one line in one song. But to me, the whole album was very simple in its underlying meaning. I’m trying to say I’ve already gone down all these roads to the point of exhaustion, and maybe even insanity. As an adult, I’ve found that the only thing that really matters to me is love. That doesn’t mean that I discredit or disprove of what anyone else thinks or believes. I just know that the only thing that’s ever made me strive to be a better human being is the idea that someone I care very much about has of me, and who they might think I could be.”

It’s a sentiment echoed on album opener ‘Turtles All The Way Down’, as Simpson sings through a mix of sputtering delay and swirling keys: “Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin and DMT / They all changed the way I see / But love’s the only thing that ever saved my life”. Now completely sober for over seven years, Simpson finds clarity by reflecting on a hazy past. Above all, it’s music of breathtaking honesty. And when it comes to country music, honesty has always been the most prominent cornerstone.

“There’s plenty of dishonest music out there,” says Simpson. “When I was younger – in darker places – I lived a more nihilistic life. I realised at some point that that wasn’t the most beneficial, not only to me, but to those around me. With music, it’s the only real honesty in this world, so you have to approach it with that respect. For me, I find it’s more therapeutic than anything. I write songs to get rid of emotions or feelings that I carry around. I think that’s why people responded to the album in the way they did, because there’s a certain level of vulnerability and humanity there that maybe everybody can relate to.”

[Sturgill Simpson photo by Crackerfarm]