“First off, let's take a moment. See these pock marks? You know what that is?” says Sturgill Simpson, pausing on a stroll through Paris to point out the northwest corner of the Hotel de Ville. “Bullet holes. From World War Two, when they were running through the streets having machine gun fights. They just left it. I think that's so amazing. I mean, come on, man, how are you gonna be in a bad mood? We're not in the middle of a machine gun fight right now in a metropolis, so it's probably going to be okay. Fascism has its moments, but it never lasts.”
Simpson might seem an unlikely Paris tour guide, but he’s a good one. The Kentucky-born songwriter speaks solid French and deftly navigates the streets of the Marais. After deliberately slipping off the music industry’s radar and travelling constantly—some might say compulsively—for two years, he’s made the city a home base and a launch pad for a new chapter in his life.
This week, he’s releasing his first new album in three years, Passage du Desir, under the name Johnny Blue Skies. Written in Paris and recorded at Nashville’s Clement House Recording Studio and London’s Abbey Road, it’s another swerve from a serial swerver. Simpson is typically classified as a country artist in the outlaw tradition, known for his 2014 breakthrough Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (reissued for its 10th anniversary this year with a skull replacing Sturgill’s face on the cover) and the Grammy-winning followup A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. But he’s just as well-known for pushing back against country conventions, whether by busking outside the CMAs for ACLU donations, releasing the southern-rock album Sound & Fury with an accompanying anime film, or acting in Scorsese and sci-fi movies.
"Sturgill doesn’t follow trends, he makes them,” says Margo Price, a longtime musical compatriot whose third album Simpson co-produced. “He’s always a little ahead of the curve and he doesn’t pander to the press or his audience. He reminds me of Neil Young in the way that he writes from the heart and likes to experiment. Sturgill is an island—he burns bridges to follow his heart, and you gotta respect him for following his muse down whatever path it leads him."
“There’s a contrarian in me that always wants to push against any kind of expectation,” Simpson said. “If something works, there’s a thought in my brain, like, ‘No, I’m being told to do that again.’”
Nobody told him to move to Paris, ditch his name, and record a genre-spanning collection of love songs—but that’s what makes Passage du Desir an instant classic in his catalog. It reflects an extended period of wandering, soul-searching, and loss. “I was in pain. I was pushing the world away,” said Simpson. The pain hasn’t gone away, but Simpson has learned to understand and harness it. Now, despite the new name, he’s more himself than ever, and making some of the best music of his career.
Simpson’s journey to Paris began as the world crept out of COVID. “I had gotten out of the label deal and I was in an extremely positive space. I was playing and recording all this bluegrass music with arguably one of the best bluegrass bands ever assembled,” he says, referring to three records, Cuttin’ Grass: Vol 1 & 2 and The Ballad of Dood and Juanita, released on his own label High Top Mountain. “So I was stoked—we were going to go back on the road and I was going to sing with this band.”
But he hit the road too hard. In 2021, midway through Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Tour, he ruptured his vocal cords and had to cancel the rest of his appearances on the tour, as well as scheduled dates at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and New York’s Webster Hall. “So now I’m sitting at home, and after going through a pretty dark few years, wrapping my head around the music industry and what it meant to me, and then suddenly I was in this really positive place, just excited about music—and I literally can’t sing. I couldn’t even talk. I was like Anthony Hopkins with the chalkboard in Legends of the Fall.”
The whiplash—the relief of finally being able to play, only to end up home again—sent him to a dark place. “I’ve always battled with what they tell me now is dysthymia—reoccurring, long term, treatment-resistant depression. This one just knocked my dick in the dirt,” he said. “The endeavors of man just seemed pointless, to put it lightly.” Stuck at home and unable to speak, much less sing, he knew he wasn’t in the proper setting to get his head right. “So I just told my wife, ‘I gotta go, because I’m having some dark ideas here.”
He dove below the radar, remaining in close contact with his family but almost completely unplugged from the music industry. “We didn’t talk much of the time,” said David Ferguson, who co-produced Passage du Desir with Simpson, “but I knew he would come back when he was ready.” Ferguson, an acclaimed producer and engineer who’s worked with Johnny Cash and John Prine, has been a close friend and collaborator of Simpson’s since they met at a card game at Dan Auerbach’s house in 2015. “A lot of times he was out of touch and his phone didn’t work. I would text him, ‘How you holding up?’ and sometimes the reply would just be a picture of a beautiful lagoon.”
Simpson has been an inveterate wanderer since his days in the Navy, when he opted to be stationed in Japan after graduating at the top of his class in Virginia Beach. This time his travels brought him across Europe and Asia. “I just wanted to go to old places with a lot of history,” he said, “to get away from the new and the news and everything.”
Before France, he was in Thailand. He’d come there initially to film his scenes for The Creator alongside John David Washington, but ended up exploring the country via moped (“If you ever want to know your full-functioning human potential, ride a scooter in Bangkok,” he said. “All situational awareness engines are firing”), making a bunch of local friends, and helping them build a bar on a remote beach. One of them was a former monk who told Simpson he “needed protection,” and encouraged him to get a Buddhist prayer tattooed on his back.
Between that first visit and returning visits, he spent about six months in Thailand. It was a restorative experience. The collective enterprise of opening the bar, the laid-back atmosphere where his biggest decision in a given day was whether or not to put on a shirt, the Sanskrit back tat—they all provided a much needed opportunity for reflection and spiritual rejuvenation. “I stumbled on not just a totally new outlook,” he says, “but a new energy I’m trying to approach life with.”
He’s reluctant to describe what that outlook/energy is to outsiders—it’s for him alone. “People find what they need to and what they’re supposed to. I don’t need to lead them there. I am riding a different wave,” he said. But pressed for details, he alludes to something midway between mysticism and working method. “Let’s put it this way. Every place you go, especially the old places, perception is what you make of it, but there are, also, shall we say, portals of perception. I’m not talking about drugs or any intrinsic, entheogenic bullshit. That was 10 years ago—we all heard that record,” he says, referencing the psychedelic philosophizing of Metamodern, which invoked the third-eye-opening properties of cannabis, LSD, DMT and psilocybin in its opening track. “I’m nowhere near what they would call enlightenment or reaching the boundaries, so we’re stuck here for a while in the physical realm, and we’re here to feel, whether that be pleasure, pain, suffering, what have you, but we’re here. Whether you like it or not. So pain is a tool. Neurodivergence is a tool. And I’ve learned how to embrace these things as creative tools and not feel bad about them. I only pray to Marvin Gaye, so let’s get it on.”
Whatever you want to call all this, he brought it with him to Paris. He arrived incidentally, hopping the train out of London to escape the crowds around the Queen’s Jubilee in 2022, and found people dancing on the streets of the Beaumarchais during la Fete de la Musique. The connection was instant. “For whatever reason, that week, it was like seeing life in color again for the first time in a long time,” Simpson said. “The city, the sunlight… if you’re in a bad mood you just go for a walk and you’re in this breathing masterpiece. I think the French even take it for granted.”
He continued traveling, but returned to Paris for longer and longer stays—first weeks, then months, getting to know the city on long walks at night. “This place is haunted as fuck,” he says. “I’ll be walking around this city at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning and there’s no doubt they’re tapping you on the shoulder. It’s insane. I’ve always felt hypersensitive to that energy. This city just vibrates.”
Simpson seems to collect friends with ease all over the world, and Paris was no different. In the time I spent with Simpson, he dapped up the owners of his favorite cafe and greeted a woman on the street with a hug and a “Sawasdee ka!” His French friends affectionately refer to him as le cowboy. One such friend recognized the Parisian inside Simpson waiting to blossom and became the Virgil to his Dante. “He showed me the real underbelly of all the neighborhoods: when to go, when not to go there, how to not look and act and speak and like a tourist.” The best advice he got? “Number one: don’t be loud. Be rude—if you’re nice, then they know. And don’t wear white socks.”
After five or six months, he felt properly comfortable, enough for the creative juices to start flowing again. “I was just writing all the time,” he remembered, calling the record “a cathartic diarrhea of emotions I needed to get out and process.” He wrote three or four albums’ worth of songs inspired by his two years on the road. Simpson tends to write piecemeal, assembling fragments and ideas into songs over time, then records quickly, two or three takes per song. Ferguson, who’s been working with Simpson since Sailor’s Guide, noted that “he really knew what he wanted” for Passage du Desir. He came to the studio with his guitar parts worked out and a clear vision for how the record would sound, so much so that he sang nearly all the harmonies himself.
Ferguson said few singers can pull that off as well as Simpson. “Sturgill has so many voices,” said Ferguson. “He has really good range. Part of it comes from his chest, part of it comes from his throat, part of it comes from his head, and he can move his tone through those three areas. He has multiple tones for each vowel. It makes his voice really interesting, recognizable. [It has] character, which is something that’s lacking in a lot of music these days.”
“I just wanted to make love songs,” Simpson said, citing the Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac, Procol Harum, and “grown-ass man records” by Van Morrison and JJ Cale as influences (“That guy is a prolific listener,” Ferguson noted).
The resulting album is the perhaps most accessible work Simpson has ever recorded, a musically broad collection of songs about love and loss that span country, pop, and rock. “If you ask me what I just did, I feel like I just made a rock and roll record,” Simpson said. “Honestly, I feel like it’s the most ‘me’ record I’ve ever done, because it’s sort of a little bit of everything else, finally realized together.”
Ironic then, that such a quintessential Sturgill Simpson album is technically not a Sturgill Simpson album. Enter Johnny Blue Skies, the credited artist on Passage du Desir. More than anything, Johnny Blue Skies is a function, a way of distancing Sturgill the individual from the music he releases into the world. Ferguson noted that Simpson is “remarkably shy, you know? It’s amazing how many big stars are shy. Johnny Cash was shy. Nobody would know it, but he was scared to death.”
During his trips around the world, Simpson realized that celebrity was getting too close for comfort. “I’d be at an airport or a restaurant, and I’d hear somebody say my name and I’d turn around and realize I had no idea who the person is,” Simpson said. “All of a sudden I’d hear that name and it was like it didn’t belong to me. It was just a commodity or a brand.”
“Sturgill served his purpose but he’s dead, he’s gone, and I’m definitely not that guy anymore,” he explained. “That’s why I put that skeleton face on that [reissued] cover of Metamodern. I just can’t even relate.”
Passage du Desir may be the first album recorded under the Johnny Blue Skies moniker, but the name has been floating through the extended Sturgill Simpson universe for years. The admonition “Beware the dread pirate Johnny Blue Skies” appears in the gatefold for Sailor’s Guide to Earth, and the name gets a credit in the anime accompaniment to Sound & Fury. Simpson first used the name for a feature on the Diplo track “Use Me (Brutal Hearts)” last year, with Sean Penn assuming the role in the music video. But the origins of Johnny Blue Skies actually predate any of Simpson’s recordings.
“When I was about 21 years old, there used to be this bar in Lexington, Kentucky with this bartender named Dave who was like Silent Bob and Charles Bukowski, literally in the long trench coat, and he could do way more Zippo tricks than anybody should know,” Simpson said. “When I started performing and getting my confidence at open mics and stuff, he’d come to this other bar and see me because it was his night off. And he started every time I’d walk into his bar, he’d say, ‘Johnny Blue Skies.’ So I just started using it.”
Name aside, Sturgill Simpson fans will find familiar territory on Johnny Blue Skies’ debut: sirens and nautical imagery, cosmic fantasy, a literary sensibility. “Jupiter’s Faerie,” a moving tribute to a friend lost to suicide, is a grand surreal ballad that feels uniquely Simpson. But Passage du Desir also has an undeniably international quality that reflects the experiences that informed it, with lyrics about wine-soaked Paris nights on “Swamp of Sadness” and escaping fame in Thailand on “Scooter Blues.”
But the real kernel of the record is “Who I Am,” the closest thing Passage du Desir has to a thesis statement. There he sings,
I’ve lost everything I am even my name
Been going through changes and finding clarity
And comfort in just knowing nothing ever stays the same
The most traditional country song on the album, it has Simpson frankly addressing the feelings that sent him running to Paris in the first place— the sadness and lost sense of self. Tellingly, Simpson doesn’t claim to have found any answers. Instead he accepts that he doesn’t have any. That’s enlightenment of a certain kind.
“What I realized at 45 is that I don’t know anything,” said Simpson, who is now 46. “When you hit 45, you’re going to lose your fucking mind. As your attorney I advise you to to gear up, because the hens really come home to roost.”
For now, he seems to be back at a similar spot to where he was before the globetrotting and Passage du Desir: excited to play. He’s headlining Outside Lands in August. “That’ll be the first time I’ve stepped on stage in years, and I’m headlining closing night. It’s perfect. I’m Tyson with the towel, man, I like the pressure, I'm like the underdog. I’m gonna go punch everybody in the teeth. I’m pumped, bro. I’m jacked.”
Who’s getting on stage, Sturgill Simpson or Johnny Blue Skies? It’s a big enough question that Simpson has added an FAQ to his website to address it (“Q: Is Johnny Blue Skies Sturgill Simpson? A: Yes.”) But the truth is a bit more complicated, because Johnny Blue Skies is a lot of things. A pirate, a flaneur with the face of Sean Penn, the guy from the open mic at your nearest dive. “He’s anybody you want him to be, man,” said Simpson. “He’s a mythological hero, come to usher us into this new era of love and light.” Above all, he’s one hell of an artist—one to catch before he drifts on to the next town.
Photography by Nicky Zeng
Grooming by Karla Garza
Special thanks to Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature
