Sturgill Simpson is going through it. At the start of his new album, Passage Du Desir, he’s unmoored in Paris, spending his “days in a haze floating around in the Marais” — the city of light and love turned into a “Swamp of Sadness.” The bass offers muffled comfort, an accordion weeps, and even the drum stick clicks wobble uneasily. “Rogue wave gets me mumbling then tumbling it takes me,” Simpson sings, “Bouncing and rolling like a cork lost out at sea.”
Passage Du Desir (which translates to “Passage of Desire”) marks Simpson’s first album in three years. After a trio of bluegrass records and his underrated scuzz-rock opus Sound and Fury, Simpson has returned to, and expanded upon, the metamodern country sounds that made him an outsider Nashville star in the early 2010s. Lyrically, Passage Du Desir is heavy with heartache, burdened by past mistakes, adrift in impossible dreams, and desperate for relief — or at least some kind of escape. Simpson’s candor hits unvarnished extremes here, even begging at one point, on “Right Kind of Dream,” to be let in off the street with the promise, “I’ll leave my heart so blue out on your doorstep/So when you come home you can wipe your feet.”
The despair runs deep, and Simpson delivers it with some of the most intriguing vocal performances of his career. Simpson’s always had a bit of crooner in him, the rich, round drawl of his voice long evoking comparisons to Waylon Jennings. On Passage Du Desir, it’s softer, more vulnerable and malleable, but not hidden. Vocal tracks are often layered and/or lathered with effects, creating a dissociative quality that’s almost cosmic — as if the only way to see, or even begin to comprehend, a pain this great is to get as far away from it as possible. The few moments when Simpson leaps through the melancholy and flashes the rough, rowdy edges of his voice are revelatory, like the chorus of “Jupiter’s Faerie,” a masterful paean to a lost friend.
All the music that surrounds Simpson’s voice is rich and dynamic, filled with moments of genuine musical delight that act as a kind of counterweight. “If the Sun Never Rises Again” rides the somber tides of blue-eyed soul and yacht rock, and restless rocker “Right Kind of Dream” boasts strings that recall early Arcade Fire. One of the album’s few glimmers of sunshine, “Mint Tea,” is breezy country with a twinge of back-porch psychedelia, while “Scooter Blues,” a get-away-from-it-all anthem, laces a Jimmy Buffett breeze over a honky-tonk chug.
“One for the Road,” the nearly nine-minute break-up song that closes the album, starts as orchestral country-rock at its finest, with Simpson even finding some solace in accepting what has ended — only for the song to slip into an outro jam of teardrop guitars. We’re not quite back in the “Swamp of Sadness,” but the malaise remains, the heartache lingers.
At the album’s center is “Who I Am,” the most “traditional” country number here, saddled with pedal steel, mandolin, and call-and-response guitar. Simpson surveys a mid-life, mid-career crisis: “It’s too late now for therapy to save me/And that old radio still won’t play me,” he sings, uncovering (as he always does) a glimmer of humor amidst gloom and grievance. And in the end, “Who I Am” takes comfort in the fact that its titular existential question/statement/declaration is an impossible one: “They don’t ask you what your name is when you get up to heaven/And thank God/I couldn’t tell her if I had to who I am.”
It’s a fascinating note for Simpson to strike on Passage Du Desir because this technically isn’t a Sturgill Simpson album. The record is credited to Johnny Blue Skies, a moniker Simpson adopted for this new phase of his career after declaring he’d only ever make five albums under his own name. Simpson has always been a deeply autobiographical writer, whether he was King Turd on Shit Mountain or the Best Clockmaker on Mars; even his concept album, The Ballad of Dood and Juanita, drew from the relationship between his grandfather and grandma. Passage Du Desir is as open and honest as any previous record — perhaps even more so; or maybe the hurt’s just greater — and arguably that’s because of the alias.
“I always said there would be five, and I wondered if I’d go back on that,” Simpson told Rolling Stone in 2021 about this self-imposed rule. “But it really has cemented every step of the way how much I don’t want to carry all that weight. Not having to stand up there behind my name would allow me to be even more vulnerable, in a way.”
Simpson doesn’t hide behind Johnny Blue Skies. With a songwriter’s generosity, he’s made an album steeped in the feelings and questions we drown in at our most despondent. It’s a heavy record, but not a slog, a testament to Simpson’s immense talents. He may not know who he is — not that that’s a bad thing — but we at least know he’s still one of the best we’ve got.
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