Review: As Johnny Blue Skies, Sturgill Simpson Takes a ‘Passage du Desir’

Sturgill Simpson has always chafed at the boundaries of neotraditional country, from covering Nirvana on 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth to delving headlong into ZZ Top-style blues-rock on 2019’s Sound & Fury. The singer-songwriter’s eighth studio album—and first under the alter ego Johnny Blue Skies—Passage du Desir pairs a classic-rock sound with more traditional country signifiers like pedal steel and mandolin.

If the album’s arrangements allude to ’70s rock and country, Simpson’s lyrics reflect a new-age spirituality and interest in philosophy that nods to the counterculture of the era. Tracks like “Scooter Blues” and “Mint Tea” find Simpson yearning for a more peaceful life, unhampered by the pressures of the material world, while “Who I Am” rejects the need to settle for a single, unchanging version of oneself: “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.”

And yet, a darker undercurrent ripples throughout Passage du Desir. “Swamp of Sadness,” for one, uses an extended metaphor of floating in a river to lament “running around in circles trying to reach the end/Trying to break the cycle of solitude and sin.” Even more explicitly, “Jupiter’s Faerie” finds Simpson seeking out an ex lover only to learn that she’s dead, and the track’s sci-fi imagery crashes against the notion of mortality: “I hear there’s faeries out on Jupiter/And there was a time I knew one…but today I’m feeling way down here on Earth.”

Passage du Desir’s final track, “One for the Road,” features warped strings and heavily processed guitars that, together, make for a sound that’s both bluesy and trippy, like a lost Pink Floyd session from the mid ’70s featuring Nashville musicians. The extended solo that closes the song drips with the heartache that courses through the rest of the songs. In the end, Passage du Desir serenity belies an intense human longing.