Sturgill Simpson - A Sailor's Guide To Earth (Album Review)
Friday, 22 April 2016
Written by Simon Ramsay
Photo: Reto Sterchi
Over the last few years Sturgill Simpson has spent a considerable amount of time refuting claims that he’s the saviour of country music. We certainly live in a time where people love to label everything and everyone, but ‘A Sailor’s Guide To Earth’ proves that tagging this Nashville-based troubadour is completely reductive. Is he country, bluegrass, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, Americana? The answer is all of those and more. Much, much more.
It’s no surprise that folk were quick, and possibly desperate in light of the pop-country phenomenon currently dominating Music Row, to anoint Simpson as some kind of messiah. His debut, 2011’s ‘High Top Mountain’, was steeped in the traditional sounds of Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, while its acclaimed follow up ‘Metamodern Sounds In Country Music’ embraced history while twisting the genre into new shapes.
‘A Sailor’s Guide To Earth’, however, finds the former naval officer launching a torpedo strike on any notion of pigeonholing, refining and expanding his artistic vision in the process.
“I just don't see myself as a songwriter or a country singer or any of those things anymore,” he told GQ magazine earlier this year. “It's more trying to express ideas and emotional textures.”
Although Simpson hasn’t abandoned his country roots - confessional storytelling, complex relationships and copious lap steel and slide work form the backbone of this record – a wealth of genre-hopping colours and rich instrumentation flesh out this deeply personal concept album.
Crafted as a letter to his first born son, here life lessons, hard earned truths, notions of morality and spirituality are passed on through beautifully rendered songwriting. What could easily have been cheesy, overly sentimental and preachy is, thanks to Simpson’s conviction, a wealth of experience and insight, transformed into touching pearls of wisdom.
Welcome To Earth (Pollywog) begins as a sweet piano lullaby for his child and finds his baritone operatically emotive, before kicking into a heart-wrenching, horn-propelled Motown groove as he apologises for all the time he’ll be away on the road. The dreamy Breaker’s Roar, meanwhile, captures the reflective tranquillity and torture of a life at sea, and Keep It Between The Lines apes Otis Redding’s Hard To Handle and Sly and the Family Stone’s funk swing as he warns Simpson Jr to heed his mistakes and stay off drugs.
Elsewhere, a revelatory R&B reinvention of Nirvana’s In Bloom represents a subtle and simmering cautionary tale; thunderous snare drumming and apocalyptic Moog clouds underscore Brace For Impact (Live A Little)’s taut, carpe diem insistence and the socio-political battle cry Call To Arms is the finest song Bruce Springsteen never wrote for ‘Wrecking Ball’, with Simpson a dead ringer for the Boss in full protest mode.
His voice, although often compared to Jennings’, is an impressively dexterous instrument, imbuing a stirring soulfulness to All Around You, where advice on handling heartbreaks and hardships channels Louis Armstrong’s We Have All The Time In The World and boasts a lovely saxophone solo. It’s a tad frustrating, therefore, that his intimate crooning occasionally becomes a little indecipherable on the likes of Oh Sarah.
Regardless of his claims to the contrary, Sturgill Simpson is a songwriter and a wonderful one at that. If he continues producing records of this calibre and depth increased worship is inevitable, with his army of acolytes likely to extend far beyond the borders of good ol’ Tennessee.
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