Sturgill Simpson on Exploring the Outer Limits of Country Music

Jonny Whiteside

As mainstream country music drives ever further into a glossy, pop-fixated territory with increasingly stolid stylistic boundaries, there remains a handful of archetypal country disciples – rebels like Mike Stinson and Billy Joe Shaver — who create original music that defies prevailing trends, as it venerates and expands the genre. The boldest of them all, unquestionably, is 35-year-old, Kentucky-born, singer-guitarist Sturgill Simpson.

His current album, “Meta-Modern Sounds in Country Music,” is a provocative and unprecedented set of intensely psychedelic country music tunes. Delivered with equal measures of romantic passion and biting existential honky tonk, the songs are projected with an expansive hallucinogenic palette that’s almost overwhelming in its idiosyncratic expression.

It’s a brilliant, audacious effort and Simpson doesn’t pussyfoot around; on the opening track, “Turtles All the Way Down,” he cries “Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, and DMT — they all changed the way I see / But love’s the only thing that ever saved my life.” The sound is wildly flexible, at one point driven by screaming guitar that sounds like Jimi Hendrix rampaging through a phase shifter at Electric Ladyland, at another, throbbing with high-voltage jolts of industrial strength techno-trance.

”There are so many avenues to explore, and country really hasn’t experimented or expanded since the late 1960s.” Simpson said. “I want to make concept albums, albums that find their own direction in a lot of ways. Two or three of these songs we’d been playing on the road for a while, and the others we pretty much wrote while recording. Once you start, you get an idea of what it’s going to sound like, and I like to keep in that mood.”

The album was recorded in four live studio sessions scheduled between tour dates, a highly unusual hit-and-run modus operandi, but “Meta-Modern Sounds” essentially created itself, explains Simpson, “When it feels right, when I’ve heard what the songs  sound like and see where they’re going, I’d go home and sit down and write two or three more in a night. That’s something I wish I could do all the time, but often cannot.”

The son of a Kentucky lawman who cut his teeth playing bluegrass and rock, Sturgill Simpson’s ingrained pursuit of artistic honesty is reflected in his vocal conviction, unconventional writing and, at times, startling subject matter. Simpson sets his creative standards high, and unfailingly holds to them. His first album, 2013’s “High Top Mountain,” was a well-received, far more traditional set, albeit one that confronted Nashville’s artistic bankruptcy with aggressive candor.

“I want to make records that you don’t hear anywhere else.” Simpson said. “I am getting a little tired of the “c” word, but I don’t want to be the guy running around with a middle finger painted on my forehead. There’s no point putting yourself in that situation. “

Simpson, for all his iconoclasm, has been welcomed by certain quarters of the music business. “Sirius XM and CMT have been good to me. There’s no way [mainstream] radio is going to touch it,” he said. “Radio is the gatekeeper and I don’t want to sound like that. I had this big realization about three years ago that none of that stuff has anything to do with me, so I just stay away from it. If there’s a Devil in this situation, it’s them – big radio.”

“I am not defiant,” Simpson said. “I have control right now and I just don’t want to waste my time working with people who won’t understand what I do. So, I do it myself. I have an LLC to pay for the studio and manufacturing costs, because you are going into debt one way or another, so why not do it all yourself?”

“I have to do it my own way, stick to my guns and carve out a respectable and dignified career. I don’t know why people do it the other way — because then it becomes unimportant.”