How spooky was Merle Haggard’s death? He died on his 79th birthday, a date he had accurately predicted a week prior, according to his son.
Haggard also died a week before the release of Sturgill Simpson’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, another sign of serendipity. Had he not passed, Haggard’s name would once again appear in conjunction with Simpson, as it has ever since the 37-year-old native Kentuckian appeared on the scene. His barrel-chested vocal delivery and firm demeanor have continually earned comparisons to no-nonsense poets like Haggard and Waylon Jennings, but the similarities also stem from the fact that his music is rooted in blue-collar honky-tonk, the sound his heroes elevated to art.
Yet those are surface-level analogies. Whereas Haggard’s songbook is lined with numbers that provided poetic glimpses into ordinary life, Simpson is much more of an abstractionist. The title of his breakthrough album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, earned him a lot of attention because, as a nod to Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, the definitive crossover country-pop album by Ray Charles from 1962, it seemed to suggest Simpson sounded most at ease straddling the gray space between traditional and new country. A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, out this week, is a loosely wrought concept album having to do with nurturing a new generation, a theme influenced by his first child born almost two years ago. It would be difficult to imagine Haggard or Jennings dabbling in elaborate maritime metaphors for an entire album; their terrain remained the sad comedy of human frailty and they chose to tell those stories one way: straight up and with lyrical precision.
Despite the pedal steel guitar hovering throughout, Earth is far more ambitious than Metamodern. Simpson never comfortably fit within the alternative country realm, nor did he have much in common with the bros of muscle country. His popularity seems to have resulted from music that doesn’t feel eager to define itself in either camp. In his live shows, Simpson is notoriously tight-lipped, choosing to focus solely on the brawny honky-tonk. Instead of offering straightforward story songs about doomed romance, he colors his lyrics with abstract thoughts, some with psychedelic overtones or musings on unconventional themes like the origin of the universe. The music becomes his own vanishing act in which he eludes any star presence required of him from whatever genre people tag him with.
Maybe that’s why Simpson chose a Nirvana cover as an early single off the album. Covering Nirvana is always a losing proposition, since the songs are so indelibly connected to Kurt Cobain. The idiosyncratic wordplay of In Bloom (“Spring is here again / reproductive glands”) felt organic when Cobain sang, but in Simpson’s deadpanning croon, the lyrics come off like wacky gibberish. Then there is the song itself, a rip against the frat boy contingent that, in 1992, was invading the rock underground and would soon be responsible for the careers of Fred Durst and Chad Kroeger. When Cobain sang “He’s the one / Who likes all the pretty songs / And he likes to sing along / And he likes to shoot his gun / But he knows not what it means,” he was skewering fans who were drawn to the music because of its anarchy but not its heart.
Somehow Simpson has remade In Bloom into a lament about stunted love. In this version, he knows not what it means “to love someone”, Simpson sings, a new lyric he attached that is consistent with his album’s father-to-son theme, but is too tidy for the original. This misstep of a song begins as a gentle lullaby, but when the Dap-Kings snap to order, the song swells, cueing Simpson to belt this reconstructed lyric, and now we are inside a show closer by Tom Jones somewhere in Vegas.
Earth is just as rowdy throughout. Of his three albums to date, this is his first for a major label (Atlantic) and the first he has produced solely on his own. That confidence results in the album’s broadening expectations. Thanks to the Dap-Kings, the band behind Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones, the songs swing between classic Memphis soul and New Orleans funk. The subdued moods of Metamodern are largely absent; instead, Earth feels closest to the electrifying peaks of his live shows. On Call to Arms, which sounds like a sped-up version of Talking Heads performing Take Me to the River, Simpson shouts the lyrics to the rafters, while the swampy Brace For Impact (Live a Little) is a cry against complacency (“one day you’ll wake up / and this life will be over”) riding crunchy electronics.
The country music throwback is of the cosmopolitan variety. The strings that stir through the ballad Breakers Row melt with the pedal steel guitar. Then there is the rollicking country rocker Sea Stories, the album’s highlight. Told from the perspective of an old salt to a newbie, the song rides the syllabic wave of east Asian cities – “Now you hit the ground running in Tokyo / From Kawasaki to Ebisu /Y okosuka, Yokohama, and Shinjuku/Shibuya, Ropongi, and Harajuku/Aw, from Pusan and Ko Chang, Pattaya to Phuket / From Singapore to Kuala Lumpur.”
Simpson sounds like he’s having a hell of a good time there, and throughout Earth. The album is likely to turn off hardcore fans that considered him a living heir to the outlaw brand of Haggard and Jennings. On Earth, he shows he has broader interests. So maybe they should just start here instead.
