Passage du Desir

Who the fuck is Sturgill Simpson? Folks have been asking that question ever since A Sailor’s Guide to Earth was surprise-nominated for the 2016 Grammy for Album of the Year alongside Beyoncé, Drake, Justin Bieber, and eventual winner Adele. It became a meme for a few months, with Sturgill even selling T-shirts and sporting a new one at Bonnaroo that read, “Who the fuck is asking?” It all seemed like a good joke at the time, maybe even a pointed commentary on how talent goes unrecognized in Nashville, but the question sums up Simpson’s career; nobody has been asking more than the man himself. He posed it repeatedly on his first three albums, which, in retrospect, form a loose trilogy about losing and finding himself—in Nashville (2013’s High Top Mountain), in the cosmos (2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music), and on the high seas (Sailor’s Guide).

Since that Grammy nomination, however, Sturgill has become much harder to pin down, for himself and for us. He seemed to get lost in different roles: first the guitar shredder on the 2019 manga soundtrack SOUND & FURY, then the bluegrass auteur on not one but two acoustic albums, and finally an outlaw troubadour on the song cycle The Ballad of Dood & Juanita. After rupturing his vocal cords in 2021, he announced his retirement from touring, then unretired for a short tour earlier this year. But he is still making good on his promise to record no more than five albums of new material, which represent “the traditional Christian narrative of the journey of the human soul.” The bluegrass records don’t count because they’re almost entirely retreads of older songs. And his latest is not technically a Sturgill Simpson album.

Credited to Johnny Blue Skies, Passage du Desir is simultaneously two things that seem completely contradictory. It’s the first album Simpson has released under a pseudonym, and it’s also the true follow-up to A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. In addition to ditching his given name, he chucks most of the R&B horns and Bakersfield riffs that punctuate his previous songs in favor of percolating percussion, cosmic string arrangements, and bluesier guitars. This is country music caught between earthiness and spaciness, and it reintroduces him as one of Nashville’s oddest artists, who understands and subverts both the square mainstream and the outlaw fringes of country music. It’s been only three years since Dood & Juanita, but Passage still feels like a comeback.

The album opens on the high seas, the same longitude where Sailor’s Guide left off. The Navy enabled him to see the world and find himself, but on “Swamp of Sadness,” the ocean is a place of confusion, peril, and suffering. Passage is wracked with tribulation, full of death and disconnection and dreams of escape. On the yacht-country “Scooter Blues,” ostensibly the album’s most upbeat song, Sturgill fantasizes about leaving Nashville and self-exiling to some unnamed island. The accumulation of details—rhyming “chocolate milk and Eggos” with “steppin’ on Legos,” taking up kickboxing to stay in shape—suggests that this is no idle reverie but a path to freedom: a way to lose one self and gain another. “Gonna hop on my scooter and go down to the store. When people say are you him, I’ll say not anymore.”

If his lyrics address various strains of alienation, the music on Passage du Desir engages with all sorts of sounds and styles and scenes. He may be the only major Nashville artist who has Can and Amon Düül in his collection, who hears in ’70s country a kind of avant-garde impulse. Sturgill is at his most cosmic on “Jupiter’s Faerie,” which raises a glass to an old friend who died before they could make amends. The story is bound to Earth, but the music imagines an afterlife in the vacuum of space: a peaceful vision of heaven, at least for seven and a half minutes. On closer “One for the Road,” he indulges some of his shredding but without the aggression and ostentation of SOUND & FURY. That’s fitting for what sounds like a breakup song, especially one where he tries to remain stoic in the face of the pain he’s causing and feeling.

All of this heartache is filtered through the persona of Sturgill the Grammy-nominated country artist, as though he can’t quite escape that particular identity. Songs about the glare of the spotlight can risk sounding hermetic at best and whiny at worst, especially when so many deserving artists would love to have their lives changed by a hit album. Wisely, Sturgill plays up alienation over celebrity, which makes these songs more relatable. Essentially, he’s echoing a very different Johnny: Take this job and shove it. Who hasn’t wondered who they are separate from what they do? Who hasn’t dreamed of shedding their responsibilities to play checkers on the beach? You might roll your eyes when Sturgill sings, “That old radio still won’t play me,” on “Who I Am,” especially considering he’s done a lot to ensure they don’t. But generally, for an artist so guarded and so prickly, Passage is focused outward rather than inward.

Maybe you’ve noticed that I’m not referring to him here as Johnny Blue Skies. That’s not an act of catty defiance. I’m not dismissing his need to adopt a new name to make this album or get comfortable in his skin again, but there’s more Sturgill on Passage du Desir than there was on his past four full-lengths. So this isn’t his Camille and it likely won’t be his Chris Gaines either. Mr. Blue Skies sounds more like a conduit back to himself, a means of maintaining a consistent identity when the world insists on twisting and contorting him into someone else. “I’ve lost everything I am, even my name,” he laments on “Who I Am.” “They don’t ask you what your name is when you get up to heaven. And thank God, I couldn’t tell Her if I had to who I am.” He may go to his grave still wondering just who the fuck he is, but on Passage du Desire, he sounds more like himself than he has in ages.

Johnny Blue Skies / Sturgill Simpson: Passage du Desir

$27 at Rough Trade