Johnny Blue Skies
Passage Du Désir
★★★★
HIGH TOP MOUNTAIN
THE LAST time MOJO checked in with Sturgill Simpson, in 2021, he was already a man with rock’n’roll suicide on his mind. “I think about David Bowie,” he told Bill DeMain. “That’s a guy who killed Ziggy Stardust and a year-and-a-half later was an R&B singer with a new haircut. That’s the stuff that resonates with me… Once I’m done with something, I drop it and move on.”
In other interviews to ostensibly support his seventh solo album, The Ballad Of Dood And Juanita, Simpson was more explicit about what needed to happen next. If his first four records had subverted country music with a little psychedelia, a heap of Stax soul, even ZZ Top-style electroboogie, Simpson’s last three leaned hard into bluegrass authenticity. Change was inevitable again, and imminent: …Dood And Juanita would be the last Sturgill Simpson album, he announced. The next reinvention would be total.
A new name of Johnny Blue Skies, however, isn’t quite the complete break with Simpson’s past that was implied. Passage Du Désir begins with Swamp Of Sadness and a classic Simpson archetype, a drunken sailor on shore leave, wandering around Paris “trying to break the cycle of solitude and sin” (84 Passage Du Désir, incidentally, is a fairly basic apartment near Gare De L’Est that you can rent online). Escape and new beginnings are constant themes in these eight mostly superb songs, but his old preoccupations keep yanking him back onto familiar turf. Who I Am canters along with a twang redolent of Johnny Cash and a confession: “I’ve lost everything I am, even my name.” Soon enough, though, our protagonist is griping about how “that old radio still won’t play me.” Given there’s only one previous Johnny Blue Skies track – Use Me, last year’s extremely weird disco country single with producer Diplo – it’s a safe bet to assume he shares Simpson’s ongoing antipathy for the music biz.
David Bowie, of course, was still playing Rock’n’Roll Suicide on his R&B tour in late 1974. And Passage Du Désir turns out to be a relatively logical progression in the confounding, compelling Simpson discography. The horns that blasted through 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth have been dropped, but that album’s glowering R&B is sometimes reframed here as a more languid take on ’70s FM pop. If The Sun Never Rises Again, in particular, verges on the sort of blue-eyed soul perfected by Ned Doheny circa Hard Candy.
Scooter Blues, meanwhile, plays the album’s prevailing narrative for yacht-rock laughs, with the regret dialled back and the action relocated to a tropical paradise where the mysterious Johnny Blue Skies can “hop on my scooter and go down to the store/When people say ‘Are you him?’ I’ll say, Not any more.” The fact that the song sounds roughly like Jimmy Buffett trying his hand at line dancing does not – stick with me here – diminish its excellence.
What immediately follows, though, elevates Passage Du Désir to another level entirely.
Jupiter’s Faerie has a comparable, string-laden gravity to the first half of 2016’s Welcome To Earth, arguably Simpson’s best song to date. But while Welcome To Earth looked into the future, a song for Simpson’s firstborn that apologised in advance for long absences on the road, Jupiter’s Faerie is a bittersweet renegotiation with the past, a song for an old flame who, the narrator belatedly discovers, has died. If there’s a key change in the transition from Simpson to Blue Skies, it might be that his vocal range has broadened further, an increased softness to complement that rousing Waylon baritone.
You can hear it deployed again on Passage Du Désir’s closer, One For The Road, a heartbreakingly dignified farewell to a relationship that’s as close to a straightforward country hit he’s ever written. Straightforward that is until, nearing the five-minute mark, a melodica drifts in, soon to be joined by pedal steel and Simpson/ Blue Skies carving out the most graceful, keening, psychedelic guitar solo for the next four minutes. It’s a reminder of another tantalising path this virtuoso shapeshifter could’ve taken, as a jam band outlaw who’s guested with various Grateful Dead alumni.
Perhaps these songs might further evolve in that direction when they make their live debuts on tour later this year – a tour, it should be noted, billed as Sturgill Simpson rather than Johnny Blue Skies. “I’m not the man that you think I am,” he admits on One For The Road, but maybe, by August, he will be again. After all, the tour is titled Why Not?.
Passage Du Désir is out now on High Top Mountain.
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Apple Music | Amazon | Rough Trade
Get the definitive verdict on all the month's best new albums, reissues, books and films only in the latest issue of MOJO. More information and to order a copy HERE
