the Sturgill Simpson c/d

he seems even more full-on into bad 70s country trope mode. WTF, cotton in his gums like Brando in the Godfather?

terrible

whut the heyul

the addition of "to love someone" at the end of that line is hilarious unintentional irony

You guys go to hell

kinda wish he'd gone all the way with it

He likes to shoot his gun
But he don't know what it means
To love someone
The way I love you...

really not sure why anyone is bemused by this cover, it...sounds like a sturgill simpson song, just like he made "the promise" sound like one of his songs

tbf it's not half as good as "the promise" but it's totally fine

NYT Profile

...it’s Elvis on Mr. Simpson’s mind, and in his mouth.

“T.C.B., baby!” he yelled, a reference to Presley’s band. Mr. Simpson is partial to Presley’s later years, the Stax era, “when they were laying it down hard and heavy. Elvis was a way bigger influence than Waylon Jennings, but you don’t wanna tell people, ‘I never really listened to Waylon.’”

in fact he does seem to wanna tell ppl he never really listened to waylon.

from the quoted lyrics to that father-son song, i'd guess jason isbell's "outfit" made an impression on him when they toured together.

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/07/473237504/first-listen-sturgill-simpson-a-sailors-guide-to-earth

I see Dave Cobb is not part of this new one.

― van smack, Tuesday, March 22, 2016 1:

I think in the NYT profile he talks about why he produced this one himself

this feels kinda half baked with a lot of strings on top

It has its moments, but it ain't great.

Album works pretty well as an entry point to his music (which this is for me, never got around to Metamodern, will probably go back now though).

Liking this a lot.

Haven't had time to absorb much of the lyrics, which might be a bit heavy-handed from what I read. But it sounds fine overall.

Welcome To Earth (Polywog) is my favourite song so far this year

Rest of the album is very strong too, I think

Finally listened to it this morning after not caring for either of the songs he released beforehand. I don't even know if I like it or not. I don't hate it, but it's just so fucking dull.

Saw his performance on The Daily Show and liked it.

Streaming the album on Spotify and it seems like it'll be the one country album I like this year.

From FB:

http://www.musicrow.com/2016/08/acm-creates-award-to-celebrate-merle-haggards-legacy/

Many years back, much like Willie and Waylon had years before, Merle Haggard said,
"Fuck this town. I'm moving." and he left Nashville.
According to my sources, it was right after a record executive told him that "Kern River" was a bad song. In the last chapter of his career and his life, Nashville wouldn't call, play, or touch him. He felt forgotten and tossed aside. I always got a sense that he wanted one last hit..one last proper victory lap of his own, and we all know deserved it. Yet it never came. And now he's gone.

Im writing this because I want to go on record and say I find it utterly disgusting the way everybody on Music Row is coming up with any reason they can to hitch their wagon to his name while knowing full and damn well what he thought about them. If the ACM wants to actually celebrate the legacy and music of Merle Haggard, they should drop all the formulaic cannon fodder bullshit they've been pumping down rural America's throat for the last 30 years along with all the high school pageantry, meat parade award show bullshit and start dedicating their programs to more actual Country Music.

While Im venting about the unjust treatment of a bonafide American music legend, I should also add, if for no other reasons than sheer principal and to get the taste I've been choking back for months now out of my mouth, that Merle was supposed to be on the cover of Garden & Gun magazine's big Country Music issue (along with myself) a few months back.
They reached out to both of us in October of last year while I was on a west coast tour. Merle was home off the road so I took a day off and traveled up to Redding.
He was so excited about it and it goes without saying that I was completely beside myself along with my Grandfather who has always been a HUGE Merle fan. We spent the whole day of the interview visiting in his living room with our families and had a wonderful conversation with the journalist. Then we spent about two hours outside being photographed by a brilliant and highly respected photographer named David McClister until Merle had enough...he was still recovering from a recent bout of double pneumonia at the time and it was a bit cold that day on the ranch.
But then at the last minute, the magazine's editor put Chris Stapleton on the cover without telling anyone until they had already gone to print. Don't get me wrong, Chris had a great year and deserves a million magazine covers...but thats not the point.
Its about keeping your word and ethics.
Chris also knows this as he called me personally to express his disgust at the situation. Dude's a class act.
The editor later claimed in a completely bullshit email apology to both Merle's publicist and ours (Chris and I share the same publicist) that they didn't get any good shots that day.
David McClister..
2 hour shoot..
no good photos..
OK buddy,..whatever you say.
Anyway, Merle passed away right after it came out.

Some days, this town and this industry have a way of making we wish I could just go sit on Mars and build glass clocks.

Sturgill

Right on

Saw him live to celebrate a friend's birthday. It's not a show I would ever have chosen to see myself, and yet the sheer galactic maximalism of it all was completely mesmerising. And the crowd! What a lovely crowd. Everyone dancing!

If Sturgill was a rock artist, I'd be telling him to chill the fuck out and just roll with the progression of things, but since he's not and country actually HAS BEEN a bunch of bullshit for 30 years that has zip to do with the traditional songwriting style and musicianship of country music, I am pumping my fist.

Sturgill is mythologizing. His past never existed.

never MIND the fact that Miranda Lambert has made better records

Inasmuch as country industry has always been dominated by "inauthentic" hucksters and jingoism u are correct

Country industry has also always been about a mythological past too tho

I love u Alfred, but I can't understand the manner in which you staunchly defend the most garbagey ends of Nashville.

I want him and Isbell to sell records (even though Isbell's records are the equivalent of dust on old furniture), but, really, they've done well on AAA/Americana insofar as anybody does in 2016, and they (and Lucinda Williams) would've joined Uncle Tupelo or whoever on that format twenty years ago too.

I love u Alfred, but I can't understand the manner in which you staunchly defend the most garbagey ends of Nashville.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever),

love you too boo but I can't understand why you're such a reactionary. And are you suggesting Lambert, Clark, Jackson, etc are garbage?

Lambert and Ashley Monroe are two of the best singer-songwriters in any genre at the moment.

xp Brandy Clark is delightful, as a musical writer of course, but particularly as a lyricist/storyteller.

Ashley Monroe and Miranda Lambert are hardly any different than top 40 factory pop, only with "Nashville" signifiers—musically, at least. And since I'm always a music person first and lyrics person a distant second, I get turned away by how ordinary the songs sound.

I was pleasantly surprised by some of that Lee Ann Womack album from 2 years ago that you championed because of how musically rich it was.

Ha -- to me they play as _sound_ first. Lambert's records sound great: full, lived-in like good Martina McBride, expert dynamics.

(And I do agree with you on Isbell. Dust on furniture is a perfect visual.)

Ashley Monroe and Miranda Lambert are hardly any different than top 40 factory pop, only with "Nashville" signifiers—musically, at least.

Ashley Monroe and Miranda Lambert sound like the Chainsmokers, Sia, and Rihanna? Oh.

We better drop this subject.

Chainsmokers and Rihanna, no. Sia? I hadn't thought about her, but totally in some cases.

Someday I'm gonna lock myself up for an entire weekend and trace how we got from the very vibrant musicality of the 80s (and every decade before them) to what happened in the 90s and beyond where everything got really blocky and cut-and-paste with numbing cadences and geometrically square bass lines. Started with Nirvana and Garth Brooks, moved into Weezer and post-Weezer rock and Shania Twain, took hold in teen pop boom at the end of the 20th century, and then Coldplay and OneRepublic oozed it all over everything since.

I know I've talked about the Mutt Lange-ification of Nashville in the past, but it's a real thing that happened, and it took a subsection of popular music that had, for many decades, sounded completely different and then sounded very much NOT different.

I will shut up now.

I am interested in this theory and would like to subscribe to your newsletter

I know I've talked about the Mutt Lange-ification of Nashville in the past, but it's a real thing that happened, and it took a subsection of popular music that had, for many decades, sounded completely different and then sounded very much NOT different.

The country and A/C charts of the '80s had records whose sounds and mixes were indistinguishable (Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Rogers, Crystal Gayle). It's true that Van Shelton, Yoakam, Travis, Rosanne Cash, etc dropped much of the gloss but not by much.

I only know enough musical theory to be dangerous. Not enough to actually describe the whys and hows popular songwriting got super boring in the last 25 years (other than a lot of it has to do with Logic/Pro Tools and digital recording). xp

I like what our Jess said on FB: "this strikes me as very similar to indie hip-hop at the height of the shiny suit era: the rhetoric was so confused because they were simultaneously saying "i don't want your damn recognition" and "why won't you fuckers pay attention to the *real shit*?" you can either attempt to change the system or you can stand proudly outside of it. this wishy-washy in between shit just makes you look like a chump."

The country and A/C charts of the '80s had records whose sounds and mixes were indistinguishable (Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Rogers, Crystal Gayle). It's true that Van Shelton, Yoakam, Travis, Rosanne Cash, etc dropped much of the gloss but not by much.

interesting that sturgill specifically calls out the last 30 years of nashville vapidity, when 30 years back is exactly the beginning of yoakam, travis, van shelton, black, et. al., which i would think would be up sturgill's alley. i'd think he'd be totally into what music row was pushing 30 years ago.

but if he can get his own "are you sure hank done it this way" out of all this, then power to him and good for everybody.

Sturgill is mythologizing. His past never existed.

Country industry has also always been about a mythological past too tho

both otm. and sometimes they get really good songs out of it.

The country and A/C charts of the '80s had records whose sounds and mixes were indistinguishable (Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Rogers, Crystal Gayle).

what i want to know is WTF happened to country-music rhythm sections in the 1980s? you still get some great songs, but even many of the best albums--like say merle haggard's--have this no-bottom, metronomic, equalized-out-the-motherfucker rhythm section sound that seems deliberately lifeless to me. i don't get it.

i mean compare that to waylon's rhythm sections -- even into the early 1980s -- which have a lot of bottom and are almost funky. well actually they /are/ funky at times. and of course much earlier country where the WHAP of the drums is always there.

i was listening to some country station out of virginia recently, they play "classic" country which to them means 60s-80s, i guess. and the shift from almost anything pre-1982 or so to anything later was often really pronounced. the bottom just disappears, the dynamic range shrinks.

(there's this other thing where in a certain subset of country balladry of the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a premium seems to be placed on sounding as sedated as possible. i'm all for minimalism, where a height of expressivity is reached via a minimum of means or at least a minimum of perceivable strain and variation. but some of this stuff---like kenny rogers and ronnie milsap and eddie rabbit, and those are the dudes i kind of LIKE--sounds like they invented the singing somnambulist.)

i guess this belongs on another thread or something.

i like sturgill simpson well enough except sometimes his aesthetic (and voice) gets uncomfortably eddie bedder-like.

*Vedder

Thee Anthony FantanoVerified account ‏@theneedledrop 14 hours ago
There's no better person than Sturgill Simpson to really GIVE IT to the country industry right now. I'm getting hot just thinking about it.

I love Eddie Vedder and I don't really hear it in Sturgill, who I also lost

the opening track to the latest album is still the best thing I've heard all year