Music |
Sturgill Simpson
By
Published: Apr 05, 2018
Category:
Country
You don’t know Sturgill Simpson?
No better way than this: the aptly named “Brace for Impact (Live a Little).”
The lyrics:
One day you wake up
And this life will be over
Every party must break up
For burdens to shoulder
We’re dying to live
Living to die
No matter what you believe
And all of us cry
For the ones we must leave
So go and live a little
Bone turns brittle
And skin withers before your eyes
Make sure you give a little
Before you go to the great unknown in the sky
Some will beg for forgiveness
From someone above
For something they did
To someone they love
Some scream like a baby
Some go out crying
Some bid the world goodbye
And welcome to die
Go out and live a little
Bone turns brittle
And skin withers before your eyes
Make sure you give a little
Before you go to the great unknown in the sky
What was that?
Sure sounded like country. Waylon. Merle. Well, Simpson has been called “the savior of country music.” And he won the Grammy for Best Country Album for “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” which was also nominated for Album of the Year and which is where you’ll find “Brace for Impact.” [To buy the CD from Amazon at a crazy low price and get an MP3 download free, click here. For the download, click here.]
Not so fast.
On that same CD, you’ll find “In Bloom,” Simpson’s achingly beautiful version of Kurt Cobain’s song. (Yes, that Kurt Cobain, the king of grunge.)
Country credentials? He’s from Kentucky. His father was a policeman who worked drugs undercover. On his mother’s side of the family he’s the first male “to not work in a strip mine or deep mine.” He toiled on the railroad and mostly liked it. From his teens he wrote songs and played guitar, but didn’t think he had a future in music, because where he came from music was what you did after work. Fell in love — “I met someone who is more important to me than what I wanted or saw or ever thought about even thinking I knew what I wanted” — and his wife told him to get out there and do it so they packed up the truck and went back to Nashville.
And then he broke every rule of country music. Created his own label. Recorded songs with lyrics never before writ in Nashville. Read metaphysics. Rejected an offer of reasonable money for a song that would be used in a car commercial. Stood outside the Country Music Awards, busking, with a sign at his feet: “Struggling country singer… Anything helps (all donations go to the ACLU). God Bless America.” Made videos that are light years from… anything.
This is Sturgill Simpson:
“I’m more interested in making records that maybe people will still talk about in 30 years. That’s the goal for me.”
“I still feel like I’ve sort of clawed my way to the beginning.”
A lyric about his wife: “If there’s something I should know then tell me now/Before I go and give my heart away/So I can get on with my life and you can go on with your strife.’
Another lyric: “There’s a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there beyond this plane / Where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain.”
“Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, DMT, they all changed the way I see / But love’s the only thing that ever saved my life.”
“Anytime I ever have met someone that was very angry or full of negativity, nine times out of ten if you really take a good look at that person’s life, there’s probably not a whole lot of love going on there. And for me, meeting someone that was able to meet me at my absolute worst and rock bottom, and look beyond all those things and still find someone worth believing in and investing their time in, I would say absolutely there’s something to be taken from that.”
In other words, love songs. Beyond classification. Worthy of great admiration and appreciation.
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