"Turtles All the Way Down," is a shot across the barricades. I wanted to make a "social consciousness" concept album disguised as a country record. There have been many socially conscious concept albums. The influences are all over the place but they culminated into a group of songs about love and the human experience, centered around the light and darkness within us all. Rick Strassman's book The Spirit Molecule was extremely inspirational,as were a few recent highly visionary indie films and a lot of Terrence McKenna's audio lectures. Nighttime reading about theology, cosmology, and breakthroughs in modern physics and their relationship to a few personal experiences I've had led to most of the songs on the album.ĭr. It's just not a headspace I occupy much these days. I just reached a point where the thought of writing and singing any more songs about heartache and drinking made me feel incredibly bored with music. The new album isn't exactly what people might have expected from a guy often called a honky-tonker - though those classic elements are present, too. Simpson and I recently had a conversation via email about legacies worth resurrecting and making music that's "like life." At the center of it all is Simpson, a hot guitar player and mighty singer whose insistence on being complicated makes Metamodern Sounds far richer than most emerging artists' wrestling matches with tradition. At other times players circle back on old styles like Southern gospel and do them right. At times the playing gets almost psychedelic. The groove Simpson finds with his band is loose and immediate. "There's a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there beyond this plane," Simpsons sings in his outlaw baritone as his band lays down a gentle arrangement reminiscent of Merle Haggard's " Kern River".Īfter this detonation of the treasure chest of country stereotypes, Metamodern Sounds continues to flesh out a deep and unconventional relationship between traditionalism and new ways of thinking. That personal paradigm shift is represented in the album's first track, "Turtles All The Way Down," the video for which debuts here. He just found himself in a new place, both musically and in terms of his fascinations. The 35-year-old native Kentuckian, who played in the insurgent bluegrass band Sunday Valley before releasing last year's High Top Mountain, a dynamic (and fairly traditional hard country) solo album, didn't set out to blow minds with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, to be released May 13. Sturgill Simpson is the latest to take on this challenge. Country and the rock that intertwines with it bears a rich legacy of artists asking The Big Questions in warm, relatable accents, from Willie Nelson and his friends at the World Armadillo Headquarters in the 1970s to the Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell today. People who seek out stories about Daddy's farm and fishing trips and Solo cups will easily find them, but the genre's most creative souls have long been interested in much more than sentimentality and a good old American time. Sturgill Simpson's second album, Metamodern Sounds In Country Music, takes inspiration from both Ray Charles and research into near-death experiences.īelieve it or not: a country song can be about anything.
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