Turtles all the way down

Waylon Jennnings is alive - at least this is what comes to mind, when listening to the current 2014-album of Sturgill Simpson! It is stunning, how the critically acclaimed singer from Kentucky sounds, if you are familiar with the legend of Waylon Jennings. Just close your eyes and you are inclined to believe, you are listening to a lost Wayon song from the 1970s.


In February of 2002 Waylon Jennings died from diabetes complications at the age of 64. It would cleary fill more than one blog entry to discuss the life of the famous country outlaw. But I guess anyone who has ever paid some attention to country music, will have run across the man, who so often gets mentioned alongside Willie Nelson. Not only because the two had become friends, but also because both of them had bravely turned their backs on Nashville in the 1970s and gone to Texas to create their own brand of Country Music, influenced by the Hippie-Folk-Rock sounds around then and there.

In May of 2014 the virtually unknown singer-songwriter Sturgill Simpson released his second album on the minor label High Top Mountain (distributed in Europe through the British label Loose Music), and gave it the strange title "Metamodern Sounds in Country Music". Looking back, that album should alter his life.

Billboard Magazine and the New York Times considered it worth their praise in reviews and Esquire Maganzine was brave enough to even call it a masterpiece. And all of this inspite the fact, that the music could not be heard on regular country stations. Since without the help of a major label, chart presence barely happens. Accordingly the Americana-tag was attached to it. A sub genre and fusion between Country, Rock and Red Dirt Music, all of them far off any Pop influences.

And then the buzz around Sturgill Simpson slowly began to grow, having noticeable impact on his sales numbers. At the beginning of 2015 some 100.000 units of the album were sold and it received a Grammy nomination for best Americana Album 2014. More and more the public began to take notice and he even got invited by famed late nite talk show host legend David Letterman. Eventually major labels picked up on the interest and in January of 2015 it was announced, that Atlantic Records had added singer Sturgill Simpson to their artist roster.

According to Sturgill Simpson he generated the concept of the album after reading books on cosmology, psychology and physics. Trying to fuse that analytical world with human emotions and experiences from everyday life resulted in songs with quite unusual lyrics. Such as the first title of the album ('Turtles All The Way Down') which refers to Native American mythology about earth and its place in the cosmos.

It's a story that can also be found in the John Grinder NLP classic book by the same title, 'Turtles All The Way Down', which may have been the source for the song. It explains, that earth rests on the back of a turtle, and that turtle sits on the back of another turtle, which again sits on the back of another turtle, or in other words ... turtles all the way down.

Whoever loves the unique voice of Waylon Jennings, like I do, will be fascinated by Sturgill Simpson. And in todays world of Bro-country, his music does not sound artificially retro, but rather fresh again, because we all have forgotten, how Waylon Jennings sounded in the 1970s.

And the emotions coming from "Metamodern Sounds of Country Music" cover the wide range of human experience, from tragic to hopeful ('The Promise'). I am curious what we will get to hear from now-major label man Sturgill Simpson in 2015!