When I played Sturgill Simpson\u2019s \u201cMetamodern Sounds in Country Music\u201d a while ago, I was struck by the fact that he could write an excellent and very genuine country song like Panbowl but didn\u2019t really seem to belong to the genre on a consistent basis.\u00a0 Later I listened to \u201cHigh Top Mountain\u201d and noted that this was an album that followed the country music conventions but breathed an original and idiosyncratic life into them.<\/p>\n
Recently I bought Simpson\u2019s \u201cA Sailor\u2019s Guide to Earth\u201d and \u201cSound & Fury\u201d albums.\u00a0 I can officially declare that Sturgill Simpson\u2019s days as a country musician have ended.\u00a0 A Sailor\u2019s Guide is an album of personal songs, some to his young child, that might be characterized as some kind of combination of folk\/pop and a smattering of everything else.\u00a0 Sound and Fury is what a musician I know described as techno-metal.<\/p>\n
Whatever they are, they ain\u2019t country.\u00a0 It seems that musicians wander into country via folk music origins, probably because it\u2019s commercially viable and then can\u2019t maintain the interest.\u00a0 I think many of them feel too constrained or long to add other sounds to the mix.<\/p>\n
So unless someone tells me that Sturgill Simpson has become possessed by the spirit of Hank Williams Senior I won\u2019t be checking out his subsequent releases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I played Sturgill Simpson\u2019s \u201cMetamodern Sounds in Country Music\u201d a while ago, I was struck by the fact that he could write an excellent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[552,551,237],"tags":[2208,555,1309,2210,1320,2209,1308],"class_list":["post-9169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-country-music-reviews","category-music-reviews","category-reviews","tag-a-sailors-guide-to-earth","tag-country-music","tag-country-music-review","tag-high-top-mountain","tag-metamodern-sounds-in-country-music","tag-sound-fury","tag-sturgill-simpson"],"yoast_head":"\n