Despite rupturing his vocal cords in 2021, rumours of STURGILL SIMPSON’s retirement are greatly exaggerated. Instead, overcoming one of his “darkest periods”, the restless country music outsider has moved to Europe and adopted the alter ego Johnny Blue Skies for a new album of freewheeling love songs influenced by Serge Gainsbourg, Gerry Rafferty and Homer’s Odyssey. “I’m just trying to find happiness and purpose, like anybody else,” he tells Nick Hasted

SEMISONG

STURGILL Simpson is sitting on a Paris street corner in the pouring rain, far from his old Kentucky home. The battered, rusting entrance of 84 Passage Du Desir, the address that gives his new album its title and cover image, is a few streets away. “I was sitting across from it one day,” Simpson explains, “and I saw this time-worn, dilapidated door. And that old door is kind of how I felt for the last two years.”

Sporting a denim jacket and jeans at an outside tabac table, a narrow awning barely shields him from the deluge. Simpson has been largely absent from view since September 2021, when ruptured vocal cords stopped him touring. The break acted much like Dylan’s 1966 motorbike accident on his burgeoning career as a shape-shifting, self-created country star, forcing him into a period of painful reflection and eventual renewal. “Yeah, my vocal cords had a motorcycle wreck,” he sighs. “A lot of people seem to think I retired, but I only said it was going to be a long minute before I can return to the stage. And I’d always said that I was only going to make five records under my name. That was done, and I needed a long recharge.”

True to his word, the new album is being released under the alias of Johnny Blue Skies, suggesting a honky-tonk Ziggy with a freaky, Nudie-suited persona. “I wouldn’t even know how to sustain that,” Simpson laughs. “I will not be dying onstage, hopefully…” Leaving his name behind did, though, prove liberating. “I’d been walking through an airport, heard someone say ‘Hello,’ and I realised I’ve never met this person before, but I could see in their eyes that they knew so much about me. It felt like my name wasn’t even mine, like I’m a brand. It was time to put up a wall, which actually allows you to be more vulnerable. They’re still billing the tour as Sturgill Simpson, because nobody knows who the hell Johnny Blue Skies is...”

Simpson fans are used to such switchback moves. His five previous albums formed a preordained arc exploring the metaphysical cycles of human existence, hardly common currency on Music Row. “It feels less lonely knowing he’s out there,” Margo Price says, musing on their similar status in conservative Nashville. “Both of us still feel like outsiders, because I don’t think the establishment has accepted how we’ve changed things. We’re too hard-headed, especially him. People don’t wanna give him a chance to even talk because they’re scared he’ll say something too truthful. At the core he’s always had that chip on his shoulder, in the best way. He’s always going against the grain.”

“Musically, Sturgill wants to do the exact opposite of what you would think to do, in today’s world where people are trying to be perfect,” adds his long-serving drummer Miles Miller. “I said, ‘Wait, shouldn’t we do what people like?’ And he said, ‘No, we should do what we like. And try and break the amps, and find different ways of doing stuff.’”