Sturgill Simpson

The Troubadour

West Hollywood, CA

September 11

In the loft of the Troubadour, a woman sat sidesaddle, somewhat unevenly, on a thin wooden railing, her neck stretched full and tilted to get an angle from which she could just barely see Sturgill Simpson on the stage below.It was the type of gymnastic maneuver necessary to experience his sold-out, mid-September, packed house appearance at the legendary West Hollywood club following a summer the singer-songwriter spent opening for the Zac Brown Band, and watching his sophomore album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music collect stellar reviews, earning him a nomination for Emerging Artist at this year’s Americana Music Awards.Sturgill Simpson may not want to be called the savior of country music, but performances like this make it harder to deny the title.

In an era in which the genre has plunged into a pool of pop rock banality, Simpson and his cosmic country from Kentucky take hold with resuscitative honesty.Outfitted in jeans, a red plaid button-down, and white sneakers, he’s loose, yet focused, curling serious smiles that enable between-songs dialog about places back home good for getting your head blown off and Los Angeles in a sativa-fueled fog. The “Some Days” opener suggests time possibly wasted but falls short of being sorrowful, more acceptance than regret.Heroes are visited, namely Willie Nelson’s “Sad Songs and Waltzes” and Waylon Jennings’ “Waymore’s Blues,” the latter introduced with Simpson’s gratitude for his own pacifist tendencies lest he punch someone in the face for again suggesting the Waylon comparison.

The three-piece ensemble astride Simpson burns the bluegrass down on Ralph Stanley’s “Poor Rambler” with particularly tasty Telecaster storytelling from native Estonian Laur Joamets, known in the Sturgill circle as Little Joe.A perfect foil to Simpson’s own prodigious picking, Joamets is a genuine marvel, conjuring on guitar the whine and grind of the loneliest pedal steel, able to render the room silent on ballads like When in Rome’s “The Promise.”Themes of sin and solitude frame a 90-minute set that offered images of the planet traveling on the backs of turtles, hopes that the circles on help wanted ads don’t call back, and a crown Simpson doesn’t want to wear.It’s engaging entertainment and, more importantly, substantive at a time when music in the mainstream seems annoyingly adverse to lyrics that challenge its audience to think.

In his mid-30s and with greater accomplishment sure to follow, the best hope for Sturgill Simpson is that he’s beyond the sway of success that too often pulls younger musicians into its orbit, homogenizes, sterilizes, and doesn’t let go.Right now he’s living the dream, his dream, determined to keep it all in perspective, singing, “That old man upstairs, he wears a crooked smile, staring down at the chaos he created.Said son if you ain’t having fun just wait a little while.Momma’s gonna wash it all away and she thinks mercy’s overrated.”Show no mercy, Sturgill.