Sturgill Simpson is doing his best to keep a promise. The singer-songwriter, who could be classified as country, rock, outlaw, or bluegrass depending on the day or record, once claimed that he would never release more than five albums under the name Sturgill Simpson, identifying his 2021 record, The Ballad of Dood & Juanita, as his swan song. (He doesn’t count his two-part project, Cuttin’ Grass, where he reimagines other songs in his repertoire in the style of bluegrass.)
In the years since releasing Dood & Juanita, the artist has embraced other facets of creative life, looking entirely at home in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and the sci-fi adventure The Creator. But, like many artists, Sturgill Simpson has found himself in possession of more stories to share. This is where Johnny Blue Skies comes into play — it’s his loophole. And as his first album under this new name arrives today, July 12th, it’s one he’s all the better for embracing.
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Passage Du Desir is the inaugural project under this fresh alter-ego. It’s a reintroduction, but it also isn’t, because from the jump, the LP feels like a warm, natural continuation of the artistic identity Simpson established across his previous albums. He tends to come across as pleasantly unguarded, consistently making the case for ignoring the trends on Music Row. Johnny Blue Skies might technically be new on the scene, but we know this is still the same man who busked outside the CMA Awards in 2017.
For as gloomy as some of these song names sound — the album kicks off with “Swamp of Sadness” and “If the Sun Never Rises Again” — one of the stronger sentiments that runs through Passage Du Desir is a sense of hope. The balance between the hardships of life and the promise of better days is an area Simpson has mined in the past; one of his earliest hits was titled “Life Ain’t Fair and the World Is Mean,” after all.
“There are some nights that I just want to die/ But then comes morning,” he sings on the breezy “Who I Am,” balancing realism and relief in the same breath. “Put another bandaid on this bullet wound/ Pour us both another cup of that mint tea/ Sit down by my side underneath the moon,” he requests on “Mint Tea,” part of a chorus that acknowledges the ghosts of the past while depending on love to move forward. The latter is the sentiment that defined his game-changing 2014 LP, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. A decade after making the case for the power of love as the only reliable weapon against the plagues of everyday life, he reaffirms his stance intermittently across Passage Du Desir.
There are moments of humor, too, primarily on “Scooter Blues,” where he expresses the desire to escape to a beach town, abandon his current life, and fully embrace anonymity. “I’ll suck on some coconuts, play me some checkers, lay on the beach until all my freckles are connected,” he daydreams. “They don’t ask you what your name is when you get up to heaven/ And I thank God/ I couldn’t tell Her if I had to,” he confesses on “Who I Am,” before wondering if it’s too late for any therapy to take effect in his life.