Sturgill Simpson, Johnny Blue Skies - "Passage Du Desir"

"There's no happy endings, only stories that stop before they're through"

Kentucky native Sturgill Simpson has been making waves in the Alt Country and Bluegrass spaces for nigh on fifteen years now, with his debut album releasing in 2011. Not counting his Cuttin’ Grass albums, which feature Bluegrass renditions of songs from his earlier albums, Passage Du Desir is his sixth studio album.

And it ushers in a new era for Simpson, who will, henceforth, be publishing music under the moniker of Johnny Blue Skies.¹ The name was given to him by a bartender in Lexington well before Simpson ever recorded anything:

“When I was about 21 years old, there used to be this bar in Lexington, Kentucky with this bartender named Dave who was like Silent Bob and Charles Bukowski, literally in the long trench coat, and he could do way more Zippo tricks than anybody should know,” Simpson said. “When I started performing and getting my confidence at open mics and stuff, he’d come to this other bar and see me because it was his night off. And he started every time I’d walk into his bar, he’d say, ‘Johnny Blue Skies.’ So I just started using it.”

The GQ article linked above is a great, in-depth profile of who Simpson is and everything that has led to the creation of this album. I’ll be mentioning a bit of it, but I recommend reading the full article — personally, I find Simpson to be an incredibly intriguing character.

He’s a man of deep contradictions. A Navy veteran who barely graduated high school and became a worldly intellectual. A family man who frequently tears off on solo adventures. A Country artist who makes waves by blending traditional stylings with psychedelic leanings and deeply philosophical lyrics. As he states in the GQ profile:

“There’s a contrarian in me that always wants to push against any kind of expectation,” Simpson said. “If something works, there’s a thought in my brain, like, ‘No, I’m being told to do that again.’”

This mentality means that Simpson cannot be relied on to do the same thing twice — a fact that I relied on coming into this album. As much as I’ve been interested in exploring his full discography, I have not, yet, gotten around to it. My only prior experience, to date, is his last album — 2021’s The Ballad of Dood & Juanita. Which I thoroughly didn’t enjoy;² naturally, this pushed Simpson’s backlog down my priority list.

But I kept him on my masterlist, which is why we’re discussing him now.

Passage du Desir (or Passage of Desire; yay cognates!) is, on all fronts, justification in waiting to give him another chance. The album opens with a gentle musette fade-in — french accordion paired with a violin, an homage to the city which helped Simpson to find the inspiration he needed — before transitioning to Simpson’s more typical Appalachian style. This opening track, “Swamp of Sadness”, is haunted by both that french accordion and steel guitar in the backdrop, which is an incredible fusion of styles and cultures being channeled in this easy, downbeat song about fighting depression and trying to resist the addictions that he knows are just temporary crutches. He uses an Odyssey motif, likening them to siren calls while he’s tied to the mast and pleading to Saint Michel.

The album’s title, “Passage of Desire”, is also its core throughline. Most of the album deals with love and loss, but a core symptom of depression is also a loss of desire, and this is reflected in “Scooter Blues”³ and “Who I Am”, along with the aforementioned opener.

Simpson’s compositions on the album are more complex than the vast majority of Country songs out there; his vocals remain at the front, of course; and it’s worth noting that his tone and timbre resemble a less nasally George Jones on several tracks — he’s less prone to climbing into higher notes, though. But while his vocals are at the fore, the music is distinctively anti-pop, with most of the best hooks (e.g. “Jupiter’s Faerie”, “Right Kind of Dream”, and “One For the Road”) going to the instrumentation. A couple of songs even have pseudo-Proggy evolutions — which might be why some critics have labeled Simpson as “Progressive Country”, a microgenre which seems to have been dead for decades.

This is an album which has been living in my head for a week or so now. Since my second listen. It is complex and deeply emotive and stylistically diverse. “One For the Road” is a perfect closing track. “Jupiter’s Faerie” is one of my favorite songs of the year — though you have to be warned that it might make you cry, and possibly for the wrong reasons.

Seriously, I need to include a trigger warning for this song in the body. The song is about trying to reconnect with an ex after a decade, only to find that said ex has committed suicide. For people who have had to cut people out of their lives for their own mental health, this song can hit the wrong way. There is an unconfirmed theory that the song is an extended metaphor — that the vocalist here is Johnny Blue Skies and the lost ex or friend is Simpson, himself. Whether it’s true or not, the song is personal and emotional, and lasts for over seven minutes. Only closing track “One For the Road” is longer, at almost nine minutes due to an extended outro. The third track I mentioned in the list of songs with best hooks, “Right Kind of Dream”, is the only other song over five minutes in length. And the three of these are easily the best songs on the album.

As a final note on these, “Jupiter’s Faerie” and “Right Kind of Dream” feature vocal distortions, which is odd for Country. But it works.

I love this album. The only reason it isn’t immediately competing for a top five spot is because half of the album is clearly superior to the rest. Close that delta a bit, and this becomes a perfect record.

Rating: Blue

1. Simpson has, at some point previously, sworn that he would only produce five albums under his own name. All five have already been released, so any more albums from Simpson will be released under the name of “Johnny Blue Skies” or some other pseudonym.

2. The Ballad of Dood & Juanita scored an Orange in my 2021 review. Damn near rock-bottom. At only 30 minutes, the concept album tells an interesting story which is a twist on the pioneering western genre, but none of the songs actually sound all that good, like the melody was an afterthought. It was meant to play on old-fashioned Country songs where the vocals were spoken as frequently as sung, but it really didn’t work for me.

3. “Scooter Blues“ more directly deals with Simpson’s preferred solution for fighting depression: travel. Travelling is how he finds his passion and inspiration.