The last time we heard from Sturgill Simpson, he was playing a religious militia man named Marshall in HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones in 2023. He even sang a little bit, delivering a sermon of “All the Gold in California” to his commandos in Christ with a group of backing voices named The Choir of Fire behind him. Before that, Simpson released The Ballad of Dood & Juanita in 2021, a fine translation of bluegrass, mountain music and gospel a cappella recorded in a week with his backing band, the Hillbilly Avengers. In an interview with Relix three years ago, Simpson said The Ballad of Dood & Juanita would be his last record—something about a “five-album narrative” his wife helped him settle on when they moved to Nashville. But certainly a songwriter like Simpson couldn’t possibly call it quits at the age of 46? Correct. The Kentucky-born country music shepherd has reinvented himself under a new name: Johnny Blue Skies.
Passage du Desir (which translates to “Passage of Desire”), Simpson’s first album as Johnny Blue Skies, is both an introduction and a rebirth. This is the Sturgill Simpson of old. And, at the same time, it’s not. Simpson wrote his new album in Paris and recorded it at Clement House Recording Studio in Nashville and, more famously, Abbey Road in London. Though he makes music that keeps up with the outlaw forefathers who came before him, Simpson has never adhered to any sort of country tradition. This is the same guy who busked for ACLU donations outside the CMAs, made an accompanying anime film for his album Sound & Fury and couldn’t name a trend if it bit him in the ass. And that’s why he’s become so beloved (and one of the greatest pupils of the Neil Young School of Not Giving a Damn) since his 2014 breakthrough Metamodern Sounds in Country Music hit the shelves. He’s the ultimate contrarian, which explains why, 10 years after subverting the mainstream and eight years after being nominated for an Album of the Year Grammy alongside Drake, Adele and Beyoncé, he’s moved to Paris, changed his stage name and put together the finest record of his career with David Ferguson, who’s worked with Johnny Cash and John Prine. And, all of this comes barely three years after Simpson ruptured his vocal chords while touring with Willie Nelson.
If one thing is made clear on Passage du Desir, it’s that Simpson remains transient but yearns to be still. “Spend my days in a haze floating around in the Marais,” he sings on the opening track, “Swamp of Sadness.” “Nights under the bright lights at Mignon on Beaumarchais, rouge wave gets me mumbling, then tumbling it takes me, bouncing and rolling like a cork lost out at sea.” This album is a French odyssey from the jump, fused with the kind of melancholia that is globally prescient but has long been affixed to the very Americana roots Simpson has made a calling card. “Swamp of Sadness” is about a suffering tinged with that sweet, sweet hope we’ve all felt once or twice before (“Pull the wax out of my ears, tie me to the mast headlong,” he contends. “My heart’s free of fear, so let me hear that siren song. Play it loud and sing it proud and make it last so long, because the night goes on and on, forever”). There is confusion in the water, and Simpson yearns for an ocean in an oceanless Paris. The beaches just won’t do him no good here, as he sings about drunken sailors “lost and lonely in a sad and magic swamp” and “Saint Michel protecting me from everything I want.”
“Swamp of Sadness” is a textbook cowboy lament spun into something so easy on the ears you might pull the turntable needle back to the start just as soon as the song ends. Tight, bluesy guitars pillow Simpson’s vocals, chippers of background voices act like instruments. Images of anchors and dragons and a melody that “washes over but can’t make out a word they say.” Like a modern-day sea-shanty, “Swamp of Sadness” is a tapestry of solemn accordion, bar-band blues and Simpson’s whiskey-worn lilt. “If the Sun Never Rises Again” kicks out psychedelically, with an opening riff as timeless as it is soulful. Like a lazy river personified into a song, Simpson achieves a masterful balance of reflective, hefty verses (“I know you’re broken but you hide it well, you lock it away like a scared little girl”) that don’t encroach upon his band’s Southern sound. The instrumentation of “If the Sun Never Rises Again” beckons the heyday of Muscle Shoals, and Simpson’s reckoning with life’s pauses is as age-old as it is brand-new. “Why can’t the dream go on forever? Why can’t the night never end?” he questions. “All we need is a star light in our eyes forever. What if the sun never rises again?”
Fatherhood sounds rather idyllic and tranquil in the company of Simpson’s poetry, as he muses on being a dad, being in love and wanting to do nothing at all on “Scooter Blues”—rhyming “Eggos” with “Legos” and using a cadence that recalls a Cookin’-era Jerry Reed. He sings about an all-day fishing trip that’ll fill up his grill, fondly embracing the yacht-rock boat jam anaphora through and through, turning the beach tropes made famous by the Kenny Chesneys of the country music world into something worth yearning for and abiding by. “Offer my heart up to the break and the sway, wake up every day in the sun,” Simpson sings out, and the bro-country community quivers. “Kick off my flip-flops and go for a run, gonna hop on my scooter and go down to the store.” But then, Simpson goes meta and offers a commentary on his stage-name change: “When people say, ‘Are you him?’ I’ll say, ‘Not anymore.’”
Though Passage du Desir is only eight songs long, Simpson does his best to wander through the muck of life’s greatest romances and fundamental truths for as long as his feet can muster the steps. Centerpiece “Jupiter’s Faerie” clocks in at seven minutes, bursting from a piano-and-microphone ballad into the type of on-record grieving that’d bring an entire stadium to its knees with its chronicles of reconciliation. “We belonged to the darkness and the moon, but I found a light so bright, though I might live in its sun,” Simpson sings, swapping his recognizable croon for a tender, tenor whisper. “Then today, while walking lost, I saw a sign that, without effort, brought your name to mind. So, I decided to reach out after so long—decided how we left it was all wrong.” Simpson, ever the kind of messenger you’d be happy to have a beer with, makes the small stuff worth sweating, and “Jupiter’s Faerie” holds such obvious intimacy that its existence as platonic, harmonious friendship song sounds even more affectionate—and its final two minutes are so eruptive and soul-stirring that you can’t help but believe the two bodies pointed directly at each other do finally embrace once the final licks settle into the fadeout’s dust.
While Passage du Desir will be commended for its more epic, anthemic moments, its finest hour comes during the three-minute “Who I Am.” Stitched together like a traditional outlaw track without the frills that have long accompanied his work, Simpson uses “Who I Am” to reckon with death (“I’ve lost friends and I’ve lost heroes, I’ve lost everything I am, even my name”) and suicide (“There’s some days I ain’t okay and there’s some nights I just wanna die”) as duets of pedal-steel and blues guitar waltz with interpersonal end times. He surmises his own otherness, singing about how “it’s too late now for therapy to save me, and that old radio still won’t play me” and how he can “hold down the line, but I can’t kick the can. Life ain’t fair and God is cruel, but at least She ain’t the man.” “Who I Am” is refreshingly honest and generous, wielding hope like an accessory of mass good rather than something to bottle up and sell. “They don’t ask you what your name is when you get up to Heaven, and thank God,” Simpson admits, “I couldn’t tell Her if I had to who I am.”
“Right Kind of Dream” and “Mint Tea” oscillate between Marshall Tucker Band progeny and Can-conjuring, psych-and-avant-country. Both songs sound like two ends of the same kaleidoscopic, fit for a beach, patio or cab of a semi-truck. On “Mint Tea,” Simpson offers some of his sweetest couplets (“So put another band-aid on my bullet wound, pour us both another cup of that mint tea”) and bemoans the roadblocks of the very language he so deftly commands: “Words get in the way, but actions follow through.” A relationship is on the rocks but the guitar sounds resplendent; arguments come and go, but Simpson grapples with whether or not love can outlast its own fractures. “Right Kind of Dream” is poppier, and Simpson’s vocal has a bit of distortion in it. It’s the bucolic companion to “Mint Tea,” as he riffs about wanting to “change all the things you want me to” and “leav[ing] my heart so blue out on your doorstep so, when you come home, you can wipe your feet.” It’s full of generous affirmations (“I wanna make lovestruck magic with you,” “How I wish that happiness left scars, too”) and a future worth getting to with someone else by your side (“I wanna give you the right kind of dream”). “Right Kind of Dream” is splendor with an expiration date.
While much of Passage du Desir copes with isolation and alienation with a beer in hand and a boat nearby, the album also suggests that facing those forces head-on with a loved one is just as beautiful and necessary. Passage du Desir is humanistic in that way, in how Simpson’s new identity and escape from his old name does not exist without the well-worn connections he’s picked up along the way. And yet, Simpson remains stubborn, all things considered. The nine-minute closer “One For the Road” is a breakup ballad cast by him wanting a lover to move on without him (“I’m so tired of walking around knowing I’m the one that let us down and I broke your heart”). “There’s nobody but me left to blame,” he confesses. “There was a fire between us, but I blew out the flame. And ever since we’ve both been trying to hang on, but I think we both know that the fire is gone.”
The accountability he takes renders the pain into a pill that goes down easy on “One For the Road,” and the (coincidentally) “Blue Sky”-style arpeggios that become a colossal, firestorm solo coda and multitude of strings blanket the song’s backdrop like an orchestral finale standing in for some grand realization of bliss. Sometimes it takes two to tango; oftentimes, it takes two to remember that love ain’t always forever (“Our love was a garden, but it seems some weeds have grown”). And, if Passage du Desir has anything to say about it, a name ain’t always forever, either. But this first round as Johnny Blue Skies isn’t some grand abandonment of the past by Sturgill Simpson.
In fact, the tomes of peace and clarity that sustain these eight songs sound a lot like the kind of closure that isn’t so finite. “It’s okay to move on, but we don’t have to close the door,” Simpson admits as Johnny Blue Skies. This is his way of holding up his end of a long-standing bargain. But loopholes are worth their weight in gold, and Passage du Desir arrives on the same spiritual plane as A Sailor’s Guide to Earth did eight years ago—even if his name has changed. Gone now are the odes to psilocybin and weed, horns and Bakersfield stylings of old, as Simpson has opted for bluesy guitar-playing, ornate set dressings and rock ballad piano quaking through intervals of timelessness. It’s, all at once, a stroke of outlaw country genius and a massive, psychedelic vacuum of singer-songwriter reckonings and pensive, concerto swells. I wouldn’t call Passage du Desir a comeback. No, this is a recalibration firing on all cylinders—its only imperfection being that it ends.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
