Turtles, Drugs, Religion and everything else…
12th January 2016
The Limelight, Ormeau Avenue, Belfast
He has been variously described as the poster boy for “authentic country” and a “cosmic cowboy”. He may be both, or somewhere in between but It’s easy to see why journalists and critics label Sturgill Simpson like this.
Simpson is often compared to Waylon Jennings – a reference he says he will never get tired of and on his 2014 breakthrough album, ‘Metamodern Sounds in Country Music he references science, drugs (Marijuana, LSD / Psilocybin and DMT) and offers a fairly unavoidable atheist undertone in one of the stand out tracks ‘Turtles on the Way Down’.
In truth, he seems mystified by all the attention given to him by music journalists and in between songs the devout Christian does little to dispel the myth of his atheism saying:
I don’t care about them. I work for you guys, not magazines.
Sturgill Simpson landed on stage on a cold January night in Belfast, wearing a scarf and carrying only a guitar.
He was greeted by a small but well-informed crowd, and set the tone for the evening with a warm heart-felt version of The Stanley Brothers 1954 hit ‘Could You Love Me One More Time’.
Simpson is probably as good a guitar player in this genre as you will ever see close up and it’s only when he needs to hit high notes that you realise that he is an incredible singer too not only in the phrasing of his own songs, but the high notes. Really… high… notes. (He took on ‘Crying’ by the Big O and nailed it hard.)
A great songwriter too – that’s evidenced across both ‘Metamodern Sounds..’ and its predecessor, ‘High Top Mountain’ and as a 37-year-old Kentuckian, he abandons moonshine and strip-mining for more contemporary modern American ills – Baghdad, drug taking and of course heart-break and heartache.
Tonight he has forsaken much of his own work and treats the crowd to some excellent covers Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’, Lefty Frizell’s ‘I Never Go Around Mirrors’, William Bell’s ‘You Don’t Miss Your Water ‘Til The Well Runs Dry’.
He knows how to work a crowd and has genuine 1-to-1 interactions with some of the guys at the front of the stage from start to finish and tells a great story about Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top and a teenage checkout girl in Nashville.
His version of ‘Lonely At The Top’ by Jamey Johnson is almost autobiographical and you sense that he has had to work hard to get here, and he is neither giving it up nor taking it for granted.
All in, it was a tight set of some short but really great songs. Next up, Dublin, Glasgow, Spain, Germany and taking a few days off in Amsterdam in between. (For inspirational purposes, probably.)
A new album due for release in the spring, Simpson promises to come back with the full band. Don’t miss it.