JOHNNY BLUE SKIES
Passage Du Desir (Top Mountain/Thirty Tigers)
TOO OFTEN FORGOTTEN, or not known at all by those who figure the name says all you need to understand, was that the artists labelled outlaw country back in the 1970s were in many ways traditionalists, formalists, old school even.
Maybe they wore more leather and denim than well-cut gear, maybe they grew more hair and liked to swear, maybe they preferred their own songs and their own career plans and support acts, and maybe they incorporated musical ideas that weren’t always the way radio or head office corporations thought “appropriate”. But they liked a well structured song, they liked a story song, they liked a well structured story song, and if it was a well structured story song about someone who didn’t always play by the rules, who lived and died with some flair, all the better.
Modern “outlaw country” artists, like Margo Price and Sturgill Simpson, for all their wilful disregard of corporation rules – or their dismissal by the corporations as not worth the hassle – are just the same. They’ve played straight country, country-with-rock-characteristics straight out rock and pop, and psychedelicised roots music; they’ve been as brutal in self-assessment as they in evaluating an industry that runs scared as a first resort; they tell stories of people who go wrong or times that go even more wrong. Not surprisingly, they have found the ideas and the music of the fractured 1970s compatible with this none-more-fractured third decade of the 21st century.
It is the 1970s where this record by Sturgill Simpson under his new name of Johnny Blue Skies – yes, seriously – exists. So naturally, it offers country and country rock, traditional ballads and an almost groove-based soulful pop as variations on a theme, not antagonists.
Who I Am trots in, lets the guitar twang expansively and dances away on mandolin; Swamp Of Sadness opens the album like a slow rising morning on the bayou, New Orleans in the distance. Yet there’s a sense of continuity in its variations, a tonal unity that reminds us albums still mean common purpose not just a random collection.
It’s populated with guitars, piano, strings, melodica, accordion and some studio affectations given equal shares, with the idea being what works not what sends the appropriate message. So Jupiter’s Faerie elegantly manoeuvres through organ and weeping guitar, the pulpit and the pews, in seven minutes that keep a tight grip on your consciousness.
Melodies are abundant, some feeling old enough to have pre-dated the outlaws, like Scooter Blues, a song that hooks its thumb through belt loops and tips the hat back for some smooth moves on a beach somewhere near Margaritaville, while barely raising a sweat. And Mint Tea goes down as smoothly as its namesake – and I don’t even like tea!
Simpson sings sometimes with a rugged Waylon-ness, sometimes a smooth timbre – you can lie back and dream in his voice in If The Sun Never Rises Again – about coming back from darkness and those friends who haven’t, about love and gratitude and the way we test both. And in a twist on the national self-absorption of back then, what it means to live as an American somewhere far from America – in his case south-east Asia and France, sometimes with humour.
The album closes with One For The Road, an expansive, time-and-horizon-bending tale with guitars that incorporate the warp of English psychedelia and the weft of the plains, the dream time of Neil Young and the sturdy acoustic of the Midwest. It has strings adding both sweetness and a touch of tartness, brings the bar a step closer via piano and then lets all the walls disappear and the sky spreads out before you.
A song about an ending, or the imminent likelihood of one, One For The Road stops just short of nine minutes and yet that feels too early to let it go, so attractive, immersive and entrancing has it become. One for the never-ending road even.
And that’s when you realise that the album is actually only 42 minutes long. Yeah, the way they used to do it.
READ MORE
Sturgill Simpson – Sound & Fury: album review
LISTEN MORE
APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Johnny Blue Skies – Passage Du Desir
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